December 5, 2007
BEWILDERNESS
| ANDREW J. WILSON |
Once upon a time, and not before time, three folk walked into a bar, where they put their minds to thinking, drinking and sinking yet more drinks.
The name of this bar was the subject of some debate, not least because none of them could quite remember what it was; but not a one would do the sober, sensible thing and ask. In truth, the place looked rather like a lot of others that have long since vanished . . . a bit like K. Jackson’s, but they’ve knocked that down now; a little like the Southsider before they gave it a Disneyfied make-over; even, in a way, like Shambles back in the day . . . In the end, someone suggested that it might be Farrago’s Wainscot.
”Farrago’s Wainscot,” Xander said, all mouth and trousers, “is a philosophical concept, not a pub.”
”You could have fooled me,” Yuri replied. “I thought it was a racehorse . . .”
Xander pulled a face, his own, then reached out and tugged one of Yuri’s flabby jowls. “Less of your cheek, you fat-faced boob!”
Ziggy comforted Yuri, who was always sensitive about his weight, while Xander rattled on.
”Farrago’s Wainscot is defined as a spurious embellishment to a bankrupt idea. The exquisite nicety of the name comes from the detail that there was no Farrago to coin the phrase—a farrago is a confused mixture, a ridiculous conceit, a hodgepodge of nonsense in itself. A wainscot is a pointless attempt to cover over the cracks that split a job that should have been done better in the first place. And behind that gap . . . lies nothing—an absence of meaning!”
”But,” said Yuri, “Farrago’s Wainscot does—or did—exist . . . It was a horse running in the Grand National, and I put money on it.”
You could have heard a pin drip or a raindrop, right then and there.
”I bought a scarf from a shop with a name like that,” Ziggy said suddenly.
”Did it have horses printed on it?” Xander asked suspiciously.
”No, it didn’t, actually—it was just a lovely Paisley-pattern scarf,” Ziggy said dreamily.
”Dreams!” Xander yelled, snapping the three of them back to what they laughingly called reality when they were drunk. “Dreams fill the holes in ourselves that we chew out of our own souls!”
”Farrago’s wainscots,” Ziggy went on, “is a clue in my cryptic crossword—four words; three, one, eight and five letters . . .” There was a pause and then the scratch of a pen. “It’s an anagram—FIT A SARGASSO CROWN!”
”It could be SORROW’S FANATIC SAGS,” Yuri pointed out, “but that’s only three words.”
”Or SWING STARS OF RAÇÃO, if it was five, five, two and five,” Xander said between sips of his beer. “Truly our cups runneth over!”
But the hour was late, and the “our” he talked about had been reduced to two because Ziggy had now gone—vanished like the angels’ share of a maturing whisky.
”So it’s just you and me then,” Xander challenged.
”It always is come last orders,” Yuri replied, frowning.
”So how much did you lose betting on this so-called horse?”
”Five squid. Every time.”
”Every time?”
”Well, all the times I backed the old nag, until my number came up and I broke even. It was a zero-sum game in the end.”
Xander tried to focus on Yuri, but there was no one there, just the cracked mirror hanging on the peeling wall behind the bar, the glass reflecting his straitened features and sourly drawn expression.
”What are you looking at?” he asked, more in the hope than certainty of a reply.
Answer came there none, as they say, but who “they” might have been when there was no one else around became a moot point as the lights began to go out.
”You backed the wrong horse,” said a voice as thin as the air from whence it came.
”You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Xander said belligerently, his own words sounding as faint and attenuated as his connection with the paper he was printed on.
There was an uncomfortable ripping sound and Xander felt the very letters of his name peeling off in chunks—first the “er”, then the “and”—blowing away like leaves in a late-autumn wind, leaving—if you’ll forgive the pun—only his initial, X, standing for the unknown—
—the unknown he was spiralling into, like a leaf sucked and blown by a damp November wind; like a rank outsider in a nobbled horse race; like a philosophical trope self-destructing in its own mendacity . . .
Something known only as X flails blindly through the infinite darkness of its own annihilation, all mouth and no trousers; crying, crying, crying for help in a language even it cannot understand.
Weep for it: X would give its kingdom, if it had one, for something called a horse, if horses truly existed, but all bets are off. It would drink itself into oblivion, if there was anything to drink. X would tear away the Paisley-pattern scarf blindfolding its face—if there was a scarf, if it had any hands, if it had a face. It would cling to an idea, however recherché, if there were any ideas left.
But there is nothing else: only X, the unknown.
“Bewilderness,”
Andrew J. Wilson,
Behind the Wainscot Vol. 10, 2007
Andrew J. Wilson’s short stories have been published all over the world. In 2005, he co-edited the World Fantasy Award-nominated Nova Scotia: New Scottish Speculative Fiction (Crescent Books) with Neil Williamson. The Terminal Zone (Bloc Press), his 1993 play about Rod Serling, was published last year. You can find out more about him here.