I thought that I would interrupt this series of writing about short stories to present a short ramble about my favourite author.  Richard Brautigan was born in 1935 and died in 1984, he wrote short stories, poems and novels, the most famous of which is probably Trout Fishing In America.  He was tall and wore a moustache.  His work is typically imaginative and funny yet sad, usually presented in very short chapters and with use of repetition and distractions.  There is a simplicity to his writing and a sense of wonder and endless possibilities.  The below are my five favourite Richard Brautigan novels.  I have tried to write what I mean to say about each…

In Watermelon Sugar

Let’s start with black soundless watermelons, and communities built in sugar and trout oil.  In Watermelon Sugar is a good place to start as it seems to both eulogise and criticise the counterculture of which Brautigan was a part.  It is beautifully written and both whimsical and sharp, with the pointless violence of the conclusion standing in opposition to the gentle, maybe naïve, ways of the liberal inhabitants of the community. It is perhaps one of his more surreal works as he creates a world of tiny rivers, tigers, forgotten things… a world which I can picture being filmed in felt or plasticine or something like that.  As with many of Brautigan’s novels the protaganist is a writer/ dreamer whose circumstances are noticably different from the others around him – he is distinct because he is writing a book and lives away from the commune, but at the same time his relationships  mean that he finds himself in the middle of the conflict.

Sombrero Fallout

An American writer pines for his ex-girlfriend, worry-wishing the night away.  Meanwhile, a short story which he has abandoned continues of its own accord.  It centres around a sombrero falling from the sky – the kind of inexplicable event Brautigan likes to drop into his novels – and the reaction of three men to this event.  The story builds with a pleasing intensity, blowing out of all proportion and mirroring the writer’s own spiralling paranoia.  It is a story about the gaps in our comprehension of the world and the people around us, the distance between thought and reality and about people stalling rather than acting, misunderstandings through being unable to – or perhaps nervous of – expressing oneself clearly.  I’m not sure what it says about me that this is probably my favourite book.

Dreaming of Babylon

Brautigan’s detective novel is essentially a story about creating your own utopias and the dangers of losing track of day to day events whilst dreaming.  C Card, not just a shambling and inefficient private eye but also a shambling and inefficient human being, has little going for him in real-world San Francisco and so must battle his own overactive imagination to take advantage of a rare job offer.  Brautigan plays fast and loose with the conventions of the genre, throwing in villains and crimes that make no sense to create a chaotic and farcical runaround.  Secondary to the case in hand is C Card’s status in Babylon, a dream world into which he retreats on a seemingly involuntary basis.  He tiptoes through the novel, careful not to fall into dreaming of Babylon one moment, allowing himself a few moments away in another – and it becomes clear that these dreams are equal parts comfort and curse.  As with nearly everything he produced, the suggestion is that Brautigan is not just creating fiction but telling us something about himself.

The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966

Brautigan’s novels feature a lot of characters who are isolated from the rest of the world and who have created their own environments.  In The Abortion, he creates a library into which anyone is free to deposit a book*.  It is the job of the protaganist, a peaceful yet naive man, to look after the library and to ‘welcome’ the books and their writers.  This is another cosy Brautigan idea, similar in many ways to the set up in In Watermelon Sugar, and this is shown up when the protaganist is forced to leave the comfort of his bookish utopia.  It is the arrival of the character of Vida, and her subsequent pregnancy, which prompts a trip to Mexico to see a doctor.  The contrast of the cold, hard reality of the characters’ plight to their strange yet gentle lives lived in the library seems to fit with so much of the rest of Brautigan’s work.  In so much of his writing there seems to be a sense of disappointment that the real world does not live up to his imagination.

*This has inspired the creation of just such an institution, named the Brautigan Library – there is a good article about a visit to it here (though I think it may have since moved).

An Unfortunate Woman

One of his best works but also one of the saddest, this is the last ‘novel’ Brautigan wrote before his whisky-and-shotgun suicide in 1984.  It might even be stretching it to call it a novel – it could more accurately be described - as Brautigan does - as a rambling ‘calendar map’ following the author’s travels.  It is troubling in its wandering listlessness, as Brautigan crosses America and hops to Japan, Hawaii, Alaska, going anywhere but never stopping still, never seeming to find any source of happiness that can keep him from the spectre of suicide which hangs over the whole thing, made explicit with the recurring theme of the titular Unfortunate Woman.

But Brautigan is still curious, dreaming, perceptive and amused.  His experiences prompt imaginative wanderings but these are so loosely anchored that it gives the impression of someone slowly drifting further and further from the real world.  In Hawaii he spends time wandering around a Japanese graveyard and having a photograph taken of him holding a chicken; leaving Alaska he explains why flying with a hangover is his least favourite thing to do; in a supermarket he dreams up a burgeoning romance whilst choosing soup.  This is some of my favourite of Brautigan’s writing and it makes me sad that there is not more of it.

Further reading:  The Brautigan Pages, The Richard Brautigan Archives

(In Part 5 – it’ll be either Jon McGregor and Judith Schalansky; or Hari Kunzru and AL Kennedy).

Tiny is first to realise that she cannot postpone the day indefinitely and she wills herself to push-pull-heave herself into a standing position, utilising all four of her limbs.  She showers and then returns to the bedroom.  Rhinestone is still hiding under the covers, his body a vague shape somewhere under there, pressing further and further into the safe haven of the bed and slowly becoming one with it.

When Tiny pulls back the covers she finds that Rhinestone has in fact completely disappeared.  Melted away perhaps.  Surrendered.

In the window of the old, cold cafe Tiny Dancer eats breakfast on her own and wonders whether she should tell someone about Rhinestone Cowboy or not.  Perhaps it will all have worked itself out by the time she gets home from work.  In between snatches of food she bites her lip, as if to punctuate her meal with her worries.

At work she sets up mental checkpoints to make sure that everything she does makes sense and then she decides that everything is really about something else anyway so what does it matter?  She sits at her desk and assigns colours to numbers – 44 is blue, she decides.  63 is green.  Ten is red.  On the way home she starts reversing the process.  The grey of the kerb is a 17.  The colour of the sky is 1.

When Tiny Dancer gets home late on Tuesday afternoon and finds Rhinestone Cowboy up and about, she feels like she has been pulled back up over the edge of a cliff.  He offers, perhaps a little sheepishly, to make her a cup of tea and she says yes, thinking of the colour she likes her tea to be, and the number 12.  As he waits for the water to boil Rhinestone looks embarrassed, as if he wishes the kettle would just swallow him whole.

Tiny checks him over from all angles, making sure that he is still the same shape as he was before, and finds only a few differences, a few changes to her Cowboy.  On the whole he has put himself back together again.  Re-formed himself like some kind of plasticine character.  She laughs at the thought.  Then holds him close and thinks about different colours of plasticine – 3, 11, 52, 900…

I worked out that she meant to bring to my attention either the man on the other side of the road, or the tree in front of which he was standing.  He was, rather determinedly, not looking at the tree.  To an amateur this might have created the illusion that he was not a tree-spotter – but we knew that not actually looking at the tree was one of the oldest tricks in the tree-spotters book.

“We need to be careful,” I muttered, putting my foot up on a wall to tie my shoelaces, buying ourselves some time.  The stakes were high – it was only one point for spotting a tree, but five for spotting a tree-spotter.  On the other hand, there were twenty points on offer for spotting someone spotting a tree-spotter, which meant that if the man on the other side of the road turned the tables on us we could lose forty points between us.

“Lets phone in for the five,” she whispered.  “He hasn’t even noticed us.  Five easy points.”  But I was not so sure.  “We should play safe – just get the one point.  We can’t afford to lose that many, not at the moment.”

Before we could make a decision we noticed that the man on the other side of the road had taken out his mobile telephone, a tiny plastic thing, and was dialling some number or other.  We both knew which number it could be.  “Run,” I whispered, and we walked away, mock-casually, trying as hard as we could to not look back.

We gave up on tree-spotting for the day and headed home to hide ourselves away.  All night we waited up to see if the phone would ring, some counter in one of the offices calling up to tell us that we were forty points down.

The midnight deadline arrived slowly and passed calmly.  In the seconds that followed we reflected in silence.  “He was bluffing,” she said eventually.  “He was just as scared as we were,” I pointed out.  There would be other days for spotting trees and someone would have to win and someone would have to lose, but for the moment nothing had changed.  “I’m tired,” I said.  “Lets go to bed,” she said.

“You know, you should never fall in love with a sailor,” the tall, dark, handsome woman advised him from behind a sombre-looking veil.  She had sidled up to the Moustachioed Gent as he stood at the back of the dayboat and watched the river, and now she was so close that he could taste every cent of her hundred dollar cigarette.  “I did once,” she continued, staring at the water.

The Moustachioed Gent was unsure of what to say to that and so merely noted: “I think I read somewhere that the river here is actually around 33% – no, 34% fish.”  Silence.  “Well, something like that anyway.”

The pair stood in silence again.  “Yes, never fall in love with a sailor, that’s what I say…”

The Moustachioed Gent excused himself and headed inside.  There were not many people on the dayboat, it being a gently cold winter’s day and mostly the cabin was alive with the shouts and movements of the dayboat crew as they made sure that everything was shipshape and going in the right direction.  They also made each other cups of tea and coffee from a comically small kettle.

The dayboat crew, it should be explained, were an offshoot from a biker gang which had started out some decades earlier.  They started out as a biker gang but had since diversified into van hire and dry cleaning and dayboatery.  The crew of the dayboat had probably never ridden bikes before in their lives but nonetheless they chugged up and down the river every day under the banner of the biker gang.  The Moustachioed Gent wondered whether if they ever left the boat or just lived their, going back and forth, back and forth forever.

The Moustachioed Gent himself was no part of the biker gang, though this may have been different had the biker gang ever diversified from biking, van hire, dry cleaning and dayboatery and included pest control on the list of services they could provide.  The Moustachioed Gent thought how this could have been of benefit to him, could have given him some authority because, it should be explained, he was a very young Moustachioed Gent and this lead to a number of his clients disbelieving that he could be proficient at pest control.  They always seemed to expect someone older, as if the young pest controller would fall for the first trick the pests tried.  Yes, inclusion in the biker gang would have assuaged the doubts of his clients.

Still, the Moustachioed Gent was confident in his ability and knew that he had all the necessary tools of the trade in his satchel.  He sorted through them now – torches, traps, bait, even a catalogue of equipment just in case he required anything further.  He would see.

Just then a shout went up from one of the dayboat crew and the Moustachioed Gent made his way to the front of the boat to see their destination hove into view.  The great factory surged up towards the sky, all fake-stone steel walls and plumes of pink smoke billowing up into the clouds.  A fine building.

“Sponge Industry,” noted the Moustachioed Gent to no one in particular.

It was not much longer until the boat reached the factory and the Moustachioed Gent and a few other passengers disembarked.  He noted that the widowy figure with the hundred dollar cigarettes did not leave the boat and he watched as the boat turned and then headed back down the river, through the thick and fishy water, the widow’s cigarette smoke and thousand yard stare heading back from whence it came.

He shuddered.

It was a short walk from the disembarkment point to the Sponge Industry factory and whilst the Moustachioed Gent trudged uphill, bearing the weight of his pesty satchel, he thought about cakes and about Sponge Industry’s gift to the world.  For who had not eaten a Sponge Industry sponge cake at least once in their lives?  Of course they had, everyone had.  They were available in every shop on every street in every city in everywhere.  They were the people who made the cake and the citizens of these cities would be lost without them.  It was as though the Sponge Industry had made a promise – a commitment – to supply cakes now and then and forevermore indefinitely.  And this is what troubled the Moustachioed Gent.

At the gate to the factory the Moustachioed Gent was met by a tall and worried-looking man who shook him by the hand, invited him in, eyed him warily – as if, thought the Moustachioed Gent, he was unsure of why such a young pest control man had been sent – and offered him some cake.  The cake was a classic Sponge Industry cake, one of their best sellers – the sponge cake.  The Moustachioed Gent ate it up quickly whilst he listened to the man.

“And there is definitely something, we can hear it, getting in under the butter ducts.  We have no footprints or anything but we can hear them.  In the sugar vats there have been problems for many years but we thought we had seen off the last of those pesty pesks – they seem to be back, unfortunately and…  Are you sure you are old enough to be pest control?”

The Moustachioed Gent sighed and assured him that he was plenty old enough.  He was sharp, he was on-the-spot, he knew every trick in the book and if he saw a new one he wrote it down in his trick book and it never caught him out again, yes sir he was old enough and clever enough.  Don’t you worry.  He was the man for the job.

The worried-looking man nodded to show that he accepted this statement, though he kept his eyes narrowed as if holding back some of his reservations for later.  It would all depend on whether the Moustachioed Gent did a good job or not.  “Come on, I’ll show you where the problem is,” and the worried-looking man led him through the factory, past the sugar vats and the flour halls.  As they passed these areas the Moustachioed Gent thought about the possibilities for problems as regards wasps and weevils and was already thinking about what kind of pest might be tempted to cause trouble in butter.

The butter ducts ran in helter skelter spirals around a circular room, starting at the top and making their way down to the bottom of the room where the butter was pumped into the mixing station.  The Moustachioed Gent scurried around the room like an inquisitive mouse, examining the duct with his eyes and his fingers, shining his torch and looking through his magnifying glass.  He did not know exactly what he was looking for, but looking for it seemed like a good way to start.  Once he saw it, he would know what it was.

But he could not see anything – no cracks or nibbles in the pipework, no footprints or messes, none of the usual tell-tale signs.  Usually there would be something to show who or what had managed to get in, something not too obvious – not so obvious that a civilian would notice – but something there all the same.  Perhaps were he an older and more experienced pest control officer he would be able to find something…  He pushed the thought from his mind.  In the butter duct – maybe he needed to look inside the butter duct?

He peered into it.

“Be careful not to dribble into it, we don’t want anything contaminating the butter,” the worried-looking man worried.  The Moustachioed Gent knitted his lips together and continued to monitor the yellow substance.  He was careful to step back before asking, “Do you put anything else in here?”  At this point the worried-looking man began to look affronted, becoming the affronted-looking man.  “What are you suggesting?”  “Nothing,” replied the Moustachioed Gent.

But then he saw it – some movement in the duct, thick yellow ripples breaking out across the surface of the butter.  He shone his torch in it’s direction and exclaimed, forgetting all about the non-dribbling rule and causing a spray of saliva to splash into the butter.  “There it is!”  And now he began to chase it around the room, following the butter-drenched pest as it made its helter-skelter way around the room, the worried/affronted man chasing him round and round in worried/affronted circles.

At the point where the butter left the room the Moustachioed Gent, realising that this was his last chance, stuck his hand deep into the butter duct – much to the disgust of the worried/affronted/disgusted man – and fished out the pest with one quick movement of his highly-trained pest control arm.

The pest turned out to be a fish.  A fish with scales and fins that flapped and squirmed and struggled in his grasp.  A fish.  Which raised all kinds of questions.

“How would a fish get in there?” asked the Moustachioed Gent.  “You’re asking me?” squealed the man, still fussing over the butter into which the Moustachioed Gent had plunged his arm.  “We’ll have to suspend production immediately – fish and arms in the butter!”  But now it was the turn of the Moustachioed Gent to be affronted and he countered with, “What else goes in the butter?  Answer me that – what else goes in the butter?”  At which point the worried/affronted/disgusted-looking man put up a defensive silence and simply walked off into the mixing station to bring production to a halt.

But the Moustachioed Gent was already formulating a hypothesis, detecting a new trick which he would have to write down in his trick book.  Fish in the butter + Fish in the river = River water in the butter?  For a moment he dared to think the unthinkable:  Sponge Industry were watering down the butter they put in their cakes.

He shuddered.

His mind tried to hold that thought for a moment and then it cracked and a tide of disbelief broke through and he could feel himself losing everything he had previously believed in.  Sponge Industry and all the values with which he associated them – integrity, responsibility, tastiness – had been a part of his life for as long as he could remember.

The Moustachioed Gent followed the man into the mixing station, the fish still flapping about in his hands.  The man that he found was now worried, affronted, disgusted, furious and accompanied by a group of hefty henchman in corporate-branded Sponge Industry suits.  “Oh,” said the Moustachioed Gent.  It did not look good for him.

=+=+=+=+=

Back on the dayboat, the Moustachioed Gent watched the thick, fishy water as the factory of Sponge Industry disappeared from view.  He cursed the fish but also sympathised with them – it was not their fault.  They had only been unwitting partners in his downfall.

So there he was, standing on the back of the dayboat, smoking a cigarette and thinking about fish and mice and Sponge Industry values.  One of his own values was persistence.  Many were the times on which he had lain in wait outside a mousehole, a piece of cheese in one hand and a hammer in the other.  Perhaps what Sponge Industry had been looking for was a more discreet service, a pest control man who would fish out their problems and not ask any questions.  Maybe they were not looking for someone who would pursue the truth so persistently.  Maybe he did still have a lot to learn.

He thought about how he would write it down in his trick book when he got home, but soon realised that there would probably be no need for it any more – there was little hope that his career could survive the blow to his reputation that Sponge Industry would surely strike.

Perhaps if he had been a part of the biker gang’s van hire/ dry cleaning/ dayboatery empire, things could have been different.  Someone from the empire could have explained to Sponge Industry that he was a young and talented pest controller – and very persistent – albeit it a little indiscreet.  They could have saved his reputation and then explained to him that all he had to do was catch the vermin, that he did not have to ask such pertinent questions.

That was the way things could have gone, but this was the way things did go: the Moustachioed Gent had been escorted from the premises and marched back to the dayboat.  His life fell a different way, and there was no going back.

“You know, they put water in their cakes… and… and the fish get in and so you’re really eating fish,” he said to no one in particular, announcing to the dayboat at large a change of career.

“Yes,” said a tall, dark, handsome woman from behind a sombre-looking veil.  “And you should never fall in love with a sailor.”

The dayboat surged back down the river, ripping through the water and the winter fish like a zipper making its way up a long coat.  And all along the way the two uttered their truths to each other.  They continued as the boat set off on another length, and they continued as it journeyed back and they continued the next day, and they continued on forever.

… and here is the final moustache, up close and creepy (and a little delayed since we are now well into December).  Thanks to everyone who sponsored me for Movember – and if anyone out there is reading this who hasn’t done so, and would like to do so, please do do so.  Thanks.

We were set to work making props and costumes whilst the supply teacher paced around the room, shouting out the lines so that we could learn them as we worked.  I spent the morning making a papier mache skull and then made plasticine worms and maggots which I put crawling around the inky hollows of the skull’s papery eye sockets.  Mid-morning, he appeared at my shoulder.  “Tell me, is this more fun than the work you do with Mr Thompson?”  “Yeah,” I beamed.  The supply teacher beamed back at me.  At lunchtime he sat at his desk and read over his play again and again, catching the crumbs from his sandwich in his hat.  He was an interesting figure – he didn’t look like any of the other teachers we had had before.  When the kids in the other classes asked what he was like, we said he was ok.  But none of us mentioned Hamlet.

My ears are freezing and I can
see your braith in the haircutty air

When we get back home we find that
The staircase is covered in umbrellas
Drying sadly like crocked-wing vultures
And I want to beat myself black and blue

But instead

I take one of the bin liners, the strong green ones with handles
And I throw it over and behind myself and use it as a parachute
And I float up and swoop down and up again and over it all again

And then we’ll be no longer just
People who lived before -
We’ll press against one other
And waltz across the floor.

We’ll waltz across the floor at the
Tearoom-disco-café club
Whilst we’re still dripping sticky
Pulled straight from the tub

And we will be as we always was
But in a new aged future place
Dancing our same old dances
A shameless dinosaur disgrace.

GAS, MILK, CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS.  He has been waiting for an opportunity to start a letter in this way and he just so happens to be sitting in the right part of the cafe.  “Hello friend,” he begins, “As I write I am sitting very close to a large quantity of croissants.”  He stares at the word ‘croissants’, very pleased with himself at being able to write it.  He stares so hard that the word begins to go blurry, as if it is charging towards him… and then it is charging towards him and swallowing him whole and before he knows it he has been completely consumed by the word ‘croissant.’  The inside of the word ‘croissant’ looks a lot like a bakery.  He wanders around, examining the croissants, the baguettes, the brioche, but when he looks for the exit he cannot find one.  He realises that he is still carrying the letter to his friend and a pen and so he finds a place to sit down and leans back, resting his head on a pile of muffins.  He avoids looking at the word ‘croissant’ as he does not want to be dragged into the word ‘croissant’ for a second time.  Instead, he turns the piece of paper over and starts to write a list of things he needs to do when he finally gets back home.  ‘Phone the gas company.  Buy some milk.  Get the Christmas decorations down from the loft.’

THE JUMPER AND THE TOASTER.  When he starts to pull on his jumper he is in his bedroom and the jumper is a normal-sized jumper.  Putting the jumper on seems like a simple enough task but once he has his head inside the garment he finds that it is a vast and cavernous expanse and he has to swim through wool for many days until he glimpses the light pouring through the neck of the jumper.  When he finally emerges blinking into the daylight, he is surprised to find that the jumper fits just fine.  A little snug under the arms, but other than that, fine.  He is standing in a street he has never seen before, and there is a suitcase at his feet with a toaster balanced on top.  He puts the toaster under his arm and pulls the suitcase behind him on its wheels.  He needs to find somewhere he recognises so that he can work out what is going on.  He notices that there is a nametag on the jumper, and that the name which is written on it is his name – he thinks it is his name but he is not sure of very much following his adventure inside the jumper.  There is a man making his way down the street towards him, looking confused and accusatory.  The man describes another man that he is looking for, asks if he has seen him.  He shakes his head.  They both look at the toaster under his arm.  The man tells him to not go anywhere, don’t move a muscle, don’t even blink, and once he has issued these instructions the man runs off down the street.  He stands there in his jumper and thinks back to the time he spent in the jumper, all that time swimming forwards through endless wool, tries to remember if he just imagined it or whether he really did see someone there.  Someone keeping to the shadows, another man traversing the woollen space, heading in the opposite direction.

SLEEP, SOUND.  He watches the girl as she sleeps, her head on his chest.  Perfect, he thinks.  Perfect except for-  No, no need to think about that now.  He just watches her, peacefully asleep.  Beautiful, absolutely beautiful, and so serene.  Perfect, except for… there it is.  The strange sound that he has heard on so many nights.  A purring, a kind of cattish mewling.  At first he thought it was coming from outside and so he got out of bed and went to look, but there was no cat out there.  Nothing stray and curled up on the window ledge.  He walked all around the room in search of the source, careful to be quiet and not wake up her perfect sleeping form.  But his investigations had only lead him back to the girl in his bed.  And now that he is lying there, with her head on his chest and that occasional miaow right in his ear, it seems obvious and he feels stupid for looking anywhere else.  By the time the sun begins to rise he has barely slept, all the snatches of slumber he has managed to catch have been interrupted by that sound.  He nudges the girl awake and she opens her eyes slowly and paws at his chest before sitting up, stretching, asking him what time it is.  It’s early, he tells her and apologises.  I’m sorry but I couldn’t sleep, he says.  She shrugs, pushes her arms in the air, stretches out a big wide yawn.  The yawn grows as it goes, her mouth stretching wider and wider, as if she is pushing so many hours of sleep out of herself.  Finally, he sees one tiny paw reaching out, and then a leg and then the cat pokes its head out into the bedroom.  She barely seems to notice as the cat crawls all the way out of her mouth, leaps down onto the bed, and disappears itself away into the breaking morning.

In the van’s stereo, a boxy contraption somewhere around his right knee, a cassette tape is playing.  He likes cassettes because of the way the tape spools around and around and because he feels as though he can see the music moving through the machine.  When it reaches the end, it can be rewound and started again.

He stops the van, climbs out with surprising ease and stands barefoot on the hot sand.  The laces in his shoes snapped at the beginning of the trip, just after he had forgotten the number for his bank card.  He went to a cash machine, put in his card and suddenly found that he could not remember a single thing about his number.  He tried to start putting it into the machine and then stopped, shook his big head and the long blond hair and the baseball cap on top.  When the laces in his shoes snapped he abandoned them as well.

Then he got back into the van and drove out here to the edge of the desert.

He is looking for aliens, out here at the edge of the desert sometime around the millennium.  He used to look for bears in woods.  An interesting fact is that the sound of a wind-up torch scares bears.  Right, the light gives them a fright but the noise is the thing that scares them most.  He found this out whilst looking for bears in the woods at a time when the millennium seemed like it was a long way off, a distant district of the future.

But now it is drawing close and he is searching for aliens instead.  He has heard that they are out here, somewhere out in the desert in America.  He is not American himself but he has been here so long now that he has grown – in his own large and hirsute way – a kind of imitation American-ness, which he wears in the same way that he wears his van.

He has stopped, not because he can see any sign of aliens but because there is a little brick building which he hopes has a working toilet.  He has not visited a toilet since the unsuccessful shoelace-snap-and-number-amnesia stop.  Hopefully there will be one in this little brick building out in the desert.  If not, he’ll have to use the desert, which is full of sand.

On inspection he finds that there is a little kitchen with a table and a few chairs, and - hurrah - a toilet.  He goes into the little room, pulls the door behind him, sits down.  There is no one for miles around and he feels like this is a new, millennial kind of privacy.

Inside the little room, sitting down with his pants around his ankles, he feels like he could be absolutely anywhere.

And then he hears the footsteps.

There is no one for miles around.  He knows this because he could see for miles in every direction when he was driving in his built-around van suit, and when he was climbing out and when he was walking across the hot sand.  It had been like walking across the moon.  With the knowledge that there is no one for miles around, the sound of footsteps gives him a hollow feeling.  This would have been somewhere around his solar plexus.

The footsteps sound light but hard, not like the footsteps of bears, which he has heard before, and not like those of humans.  He can only assume that they are alien footsteps.  He stays where he is sitting, and thinks about how he was right to come out here, to the edge of the desert to look for aliens near the turn of the millennium.

He cannot remember a four digit bank number but he has a knack for finding aliens.

He sits there finishing his business until the footsteps disappear.  He assumes that the footsteps belong to aliens.  Once they have gone, he gets up and leaves the little room.  The hollow feeling is still in or around his solar plexus.

He wonders what kind of alien the footsteps might have belonged to.  It might have been good to see them.  He decides to try and find something to eat in the little building’s kitchen.  He feels like he needs something to eat now, after that.

In the kitchen there are cupboards which appear to be full of food, but when he starts to examine the the tins and boxes and cans and tubs of food he finds that they have all gone off.  Expired, you might say.  He peers into them one by one and discovers mould – every different type of mould you could imagine.  There are some that look like scabs and some that look like mushrooms.  His favourite is where there has grown a thick and all-encompassing fur.  He finds a jar which is full of it and he sticks his hand in, enjoying the feel of the fuzz growing all around.  It feels like one of those pictures in which the world has been fast-forwarded through the millennia and the Americans have all died out and everything is crumbling and decayed and overgrown with no plan or purpose.

This is all fascinating but he did not come out to the desert to look for mould.  He came to look for aliens.  He puts down the jar and leaves the little building, stepping back into the sunlight.

The heat of the afternoon sun travels millions of miles to hit him in the face as he stands outside the little building, there in the middle of the desert in America sometime around the turn of the millennium.  If he had any food he could put it in the palm of his hand and bake it in the sun’s heat, which may be an exaggeration – the kind of exaggeration regularly generated by the kind of mind that thinks it is a good idea to go looking for aliens in the American desert.

His van-suit has been tipped over in the sand so that it is lying on its side.  The tape from his cassette has been pulled out of its plastic casing and is strung out all around in flourishes of alien black plastic shapes.  He cannot see anyone for miles around.

There’s that hollow feeling in his solar plexus again, a kind of empty pre-millennial fatalism.  He can bury himself in the sand or he can bake himself in the sun or he can abandon all hope and let himself be taken over by the all-consuming mould in the kitchen of the little brick building.