The Fat Man is looking at a mountain exploding in front of him from a distance of ten miles. Not much distance for such an enormous explosion. The fat man is wearing a black, collarless jacket, expensive and fashionable some years ago in a different hemisphere. His white shirt is stained red, his matching trousers are in tatters, one leg missing up to the mid-thigh, which is little problem as the leg intended to inhabit it is also missing and has been for some days.

Sitting next to him is a blond woman with a china complexion and no expression other than blank indifference. Unlike the fat man, she is not sweating. All the fluid is gone from her body along with the salt and hope. She is as desolate as the scrubbed hill on which they sit.

“We’d better get going. Can you stand up?” he tries to stand, leaning on a rock for support, but he slips back down to earth. She laughs, using the same tone that a prematurely buried, suicide would use on discovering the weight of earth on the coffin lid. She no longer wants to work for him. He has killed all the talent that used to make the job fun, everybody leaves them one way or another. They travel the world, using his money and her organisational skills. They look for secrets and then get other people to write about them. They then sell the writing. 

The exploding mountain isn’t a secret, never was. It was public knowledge that “tests” were carried out inside the mountain. It became common knowledge when the authorities relocated all outlying villages twenty years before. The mountain is called Ibis or in some offices in Washington and London, “Curlew”. The mountain tests theories about faster than light particle acceleration. Two thousand people worked in and around the mountain. Fifty per cent of them are hyper-specialists who understand subatomic physics, computers and paintballing. The other fifty per cent are support staff, visiting technicians, administrators and the military. There are (were) Japanese, French, Swiss, English, German, American and one Belgian human being. There are two non-whites and one non-occidental. They are all dead now. No bleeding – save for the fat man’s leg – no pain and no remains. They have all been accelerated out of this world and into several next ones. 

They had isolated the Higgs Boson but this wasn’t the cause of the explosion, that was caused by what looks like a cock-up involving heat sinks, poor code, a date-related bug and a Microsoft Outlook infesting-virus sent person or person unknown. 

Sandra Klept remains seated as the rest of the company Christmas party stands and applauds. They are gathered in the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. They are applauding her husband, their boss, and the man that she wishes was if not dead, then at least horrible mutilated. She sneers and drinks some more mineral water. She scratches the back of her right calf muscle and sneers some more. The company, all three hundred and twelve of them, sits as her husband, Christ-like, motions for them to do so. She stands and walks away from the top table, taking her bottle of mineral water with her. He leads a round of applause for her, looking as if he means it with love and good intentions. He does, he doesn’t know that she is arranging a coup because, as she put it, she is, “Just so over his egomaniacal people manglement, talent vampirism and atrocious personality”, she goes to the lavatory to snort cocaine like the 1980s.

“This is too cool, fully,” Anderson Ballmoore hits “Reload” and the page drizzles down the screen of his Mitsubishi 56-inch multisync flatscreen, “They got it online yesterday and today they’ve gone bust… so Del put all their code libraries online just to fuck the manglement off. There’s gigabytes of the stuff here, all proprietary. Most of it’s C+++, some Java and VB and some stuff  I’ve never seen before.”

Davis Dorn, teen coder and ultra-virgin, sweeps his contact-lensed gaze at the directories containing “stuff” and rocks in his seat, “That’s Logo, that’s Pascal and that’s Applescript but you’re correctamundo, that other stuff is stuff. Coolio.” He returns to a cross-legged, arm-crossed defensive mode on the floor, his laptop is on the desk, connected to his brain by an infra-red keyboard and mouse link. It connected to the world, via Novell networking, a Linux box, a Firewall (that he coded) and a T3 line. For once he is not writing code, not even a Perl script. Instead he is ripping the website to a temporary online storage folder that the company set up in one of its international mirrors. This one is in Finland and is 530GB in size. Until ten minutes ago it contained 100GB of music and video. That has been erased and the space re-formatted. 

Anderson opens a window containing some text, he picks up where he left off twenty minutes previously, continuing with a letter of love and yearning. He intends to use it as the seed for a program that will create a virtual university; more accurately it will be a virtual hang-out where students will come and learn to relate to both the business and real worlds. His love letter will welcome anybody who wants to join because he realises that welcoming people is important, love is all you need and the search for that love is a massive time waster when you’re trying to work up some really useful ideas. 

Dear <name_nick>

Welcome to MIT, the My Institute of Technology. We really <rand_pos_verb> that you’ve decided to enrol with us and <rand_des_verb) that you will <rand_att_verb> as much from the facilities as we do.

As today is a <rand_grand_adj> day in your life and ours, I feel that now is the time to tell you that I’ve never seen anybody as <rand_sex_adj> and <rand_sex_adj) as you. The moment you posted your profile, I knew that my life would change forever. Please keep this very much to yourself as I do not want to embarrass either myself or you.

You will find all necessary timetables, papers, notes and propaganda in your home directory. Your initial access pass is <applet code=”pass.class” CODEBASE=”/insecode/initial/runonce>. 

You can reach me at <rand_lurve>@mitty.com.

Welcome once again

Jenny Rate

{You do realise that no one in their right mind is going to believe any of that shit don’t you?” A messenger window has opened up on Anderson’s screen, in it is the text of the file he has just saved to the insecure code-bin on the external server.}

{Of course I do. That’s the point, the students will also know that and they will do one of two things: ignore it or create a small cult around Jenny. I am interested in both of these outcomes. Anyway, what else am I going to do with my time and all this processor power?}

{You could win the lottery again. You could calculate the optimal method for reducing Third World Debt. You could hack a pharmaceutical company and then release its hidden files to the media. You could download porn. But most of all you could stop wasting your time on pointless sociology riffs that you never follow up. You are not going to get any students because you don’t have any teachers}

{As you well know, MITTY is a looped feedback system. The students are the teachers.}

{As I well know, that is garbage. That is the kind of enclosed loop that produces noise and no feedback. That is yet another way of looking as if you’re going to achieve something by piling up code, but never actually achieving anything other than code. How is your real work coming along?}

{Davis is keeping me waiting for the updates to the backend 🙁 }

{Davis, are you reading this?}

Davis glances into the messenger window that has crashed through his command line prompt like a garish tourist nosing around the Sacré-Cœur in Paris, decimating the sanctified calm with wolf whistles and awe-inspired shrieks and woops.

{Yes I am reading this.}

{And?}

{And what?}

{And where is the updated backend?}

{On the Minx server. Same as it has been for three hours. Please refer to my email of the 7th. Here is a copy for your reference.}

{Thank you Davis} and the message window disappears, enabling Davis to continue with his work. 

{Anderson, you are a liar}

{Yes. And?}

{Be a liar on your own time}

{This is my own time}

{I am not getting into this. Suffice to say, you have entered into a contract with me and you are not fulfilling your part of that contract}

{So sue me}

{You know, winning that lottery has turned you in a  socio-thug. Just do the work that is assigned to you and then I don’t care what you get up to}

{No really sue me. Or sack me. Exercise some fucking power}

{No. DO THE WORK}

And the message window closes. Untroubled by conscience or ethical considerations since winning 55 million dollars, US, on a state lottery, Anderson is surprised to discover that his hackles are up. He closes the workspace containing the MITTY model and opens another, checks into the code -safe and prepares to add some sendmail and other, largely kiddy routines that need his knowledge of the company’s security routines to the code that Davis uploaded three days before. He is sulking, at least his social self is sulking. The part of him that deals with work is causing his fingers to move an infra-red, force-feedback (totally unnecessary) mouse to highlight areas of the workspace, adding and subtracting lines here and there, compiling, linking and testing. 

The fat man is not at all happy in his hospital bed in Darwin. He isn’t happy with the noise, he isn’t happy with the fact that his health insurance is in some form of bureaucratic stasis, he isn’t happy with food and he isn’t happy with his stump. This state of pissed-offness is not unusual for him, it is his natural state and derives from the fact that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he is certain that everybody else in the world, including his clients and the blond woman, are all idiots. Over the years, the rest of the planet’s population has stopped being a glob of disconnected idiots and morphed into a huge, integrated, circus of dolts, fools, cretins and clowns. No one is capable of doing anything other than throwing obstacles in his way. Even his mother, who threw more cash at him than is right and proper, is now a desolate, disintegrating blob of cells sitting somewhere in Canberra, writing longhand letters to Murdoch and Packer and, of course, to him. She travels still, even at 85, but will not come and see him because of an argument they had ten years before. 

So he lies in a public ward, surrounded by aborigines (or Indiginies or black-fellas) and poor white trash all of whom are moaning or farting mouth-noises at their tribes of visitors. Having lost his travel documents in the rush away from the initial fires inside the particle accelerator, he has sent the blond woman off to the nearest Internet cafe to try to sort out his life. 

He looks at his enormous stomach which he has uncovered to get cool but also to ensure that no one will come too close. He likes his ugliness mainly because other people don’t but also because fifteen years of therapy have armed him with enough false self-imagery that he honestly believes that it is really all subjective.

His ex-wife, Tara, had watched his spreading torso keeping pace with this ego in a direct anti-relationship to his hair and social skills. True, he retains charisma, in bucket loads but charisma is one of those strange character variables that won’t go away if you’ve got it. He uses it to manipulate idiots into positions where he can employ them before submitting them to a steep, ever descending curve that slices through their self-worth until they either leave his employ or are so reduced that they have nowhere else to go. He has roughly 100 to 115 such ghosts slopping away at research and hack writing in two offices in New South Wales. Every so often he choses a “favourite”, explains in some unspoken and unspeakable code to the blonde woman that this person must be treated with a smile and slightly more courtesy than she would usually use, and takes them into layer one of his confidence.

As a liar of some discipline and no small brutality, he then feeds through enough information to ensure that this person would be forced to perjure themselves if any of the companies’ less than entirely legal schemes came to the attention of the authorities. After about a month, often times less, this favourite begins their skid down the backend of the curve. 

His current favourite is called Martin Closer – he never choses women – and Martin is now speaking with the blonde woman in an internet cafe just off the main Darwin drag, opposite Woolworths in fact where she recently purchased cosmetics, a can of Coke, a packet of Marlboro Lites and some sanitary napkins.

The blonde woman is not on the curve, never has been. She has the ability however, to seem less like a total buffoon than the rest of the world, mainly because she only ever does what she is told. She then takes her stress out on the ghosts and the occasional journalist phoning for an interview for some pointless profile in some pointless paper or magazine. She was going to be a doctor but smoked too much Bushbud and fell into the job as his PA. The Bushbud – hydroponically grown cannabis that musters the same effect as mildly pure heroin without the stigma – protects her from the mores of Fat Man rage. It also provides a thudding, woolly shield against the ghosts. His sociopathy has seeped into her ensuring that she never becomes attached to any of the “monkeys” as she calls the staff.

Her name is Joy. Everybody calls her Princess Lea because she always seems to be at the feet of Jabba the Hut.

Following the Christmas speech the MCA descended into a kind of  null party. Not a non-party and far from a party-party. This was a party waiting to be filled like a function waiting to have its component parts related. Everybody knew what they were supposed to do but nobody, save the secretaries and “non-creatives”, knew how to do it. The support staff simply drank the drink, boogied to the music, said sentimental things, touched other support staff in a way that would usually be frowned upon and talked to the management in a way that would always be frowned upon. It was basic human interaction. Confusing. 

Joseph Dyer, the “boss”, took it all in his stride, especially the abuse which, as he was honest with himself, was low level stuff and nothing to take seriously other than to deal with it.

“The second floor, up where Popular PC is, it’s always disgusting… they never clear up cups or papers or pizza or nothing. I bloody complain about them all th time but no one ever bloody listens to a bloody word. They’re animals they just don’t care.” 

Billy Taylor had been with the company since it began in 1989 and was always complaining that the staffers were pigs, which for the most part they were not. 

Of course, Billy Taylor is in fact, William Talforth-Taylor former emeritus professor of number theory at Monash University until 1988 when he flipped out in spectacular fashion, and published every single mote of research on Usenet silently in his office. Then he stripped to red-ochre painted nakedness and drank a bottle of gin to wash down a rattle of amphetamines. He has been Dyer’s tutor and good friend, so he had been taken in. But he would not stop complaining and he would not ever refer to his previous life as one of Australia’s most distinguished academics. He had, in fact, taken on the persona of his own family’s gardener, a deeply troubled, preternaturally surly old man called Mick Telfer who had offered the first true glimpse of fear that the young William had encountered.

Joe Dyer kept him around because this was not only the right thing to do, but also because Billy had a habit – unknown to himself – of annotating lazy spreadsheets so that they came up to some kind of standard. He did this because Joe would leave printouts in his cubby hole and retreat, the printouts would always be disguised as garbage, they would always be found in a bin by the first floor photocopier with various functions tweaked with a thick, green pencil. Joe made sure that  Bill was paid well over the odds for an office cleaner – a job that he also excelled at. This exchange of crumpled paper was the only time that the psycho-armour that Billy used was ever penetrated; neither man ever mentioned it to the other. 

Sandra Klept was buzzing now, riding the waves of cocaine, red-eyed and a full harridan. Her husband was talking to the old man, the rest of the dorks were spastically and spasmodically partying. She was once again trying to work out why she was feeling blue. One part of her, the part that drove down Madison Avenue in a Buick with cigarette ash blowing into her hair from the beautiful hand of a James Dean/Christian Slater/Brad Pitt/Rock Hudson/Raquel Welch creature constructed from moving denim and static, true diamond rocks; that part was a happy, sexually fulfilled, lucid, beating heartfelt person-girl, loved and loving. 

The other part, the part that sat at long tables watching young vibroes still talking about work (and snowboards), targets (and holidays without partners or briefcases) not understanding why they asked for dreadful C&W like the Hanson Family, Emmylou Harris and Kasey fucking Chambers. Country and Western was trash music, disgusting, and these kids were educated at MIT and should have known better; even worse, she knew that she was just getting old like in a Philip Roth or Pynchon kind of way.

The thing that really got to her was that  her upbringing meant that she wouldn’t cause a scene. She could see the sense in this gathering, she could see that people were – in their ways – simply trying to be happy by playing the game. She began to dig holes in herself with a psychological cutting spade (the kind that Qkwee-Qkway used on the  whales that never satisfied Ahab). 

I am too good for these people.

But if I am too good for these people, then who am I  not good enough for and who do I fit with? And if there are either of those sets of people then why am not with them? And I meant, who am I not too good enough for? And now I can’t think in words because I’m not good enough for those either, not like these people who are using words with other, and the thought of them using words with each other is enough for me to a staircase with my father in a bed, with a drip at the bottom of it, and I am falling off and down and into his bed where he is not-dead. 

She takes a drink from the table, a glass of red wine, poor red wine by her standards and wipes away the thinking by drinking a long draft like Penelope waiting for Odysseus to come and make sense of her life. Of course, he’s still talking about war and horses with the boys; in his way. She pours some more poor wine and wonders if she should change dealer, well coke dealer at least because it seems to be losing the battle with the Ritalin and Moggies that she had taken before. 

I want an evil man who thinks about doing wrong to make me feel fine. I’ve got a good man and a  jeroboam of self-pity because I can’t be as good as him, and he forgives me. So I want him. 

The president and the prime minister are saying dreadful things in the news over Christmas. The exploding mountain with the particle accelerator that held Higgs Bosons among other things isn’t easy to explain to the general public, even the general public with a passing knowledge from New Scientist or Scientific American or a website or ten thousand.

The media is making a mess of it, cock-up has taken over from conspiracy and all sorts of total nonsense is bleeding into early evening bulletins and “ready for air” webTV specials starring Eric Roberts. Even kids’ new spots are highlighting the man made volcano (which it wasn’t, there was no lava flow or magma stings,  no Herculeanums below) as yet another reason to hate big business. 

In the pub are three of the most highly educated physicists and mathematicians (Jones doubles up) the world has ever known, ergo they are all under the age of 28 years. The pub is on the campus of Georgia Tech in Atlanta. They were on a tour in Curlew that ended ten hours before it went pop. They are right royally pissed off and preparing to get drunk but first they have to argue about technical matters such as whether the satellite uplink that was supposed to be running every second of everyday to back up data on the run, was really working. They think it was one of those things that the governments told them. But they also think that it’s exactly the kind of thing that governments would do in order to rip the kind of data that you would consider to be personal.

Adam Smith was their hero.

Thomas Hobbes was who they believed in.

But they  still took holidays and dressed differently enough to their seniors to make them look softly independent. By understanding physics, they also seemed to understand why their bills should be paid on time, and their cars serviced; their diets were regulated and they rode mountain bikes over distances of less than five miles. Drinking was a rare, and celebrated, event, celebrated in memory like the first time over and over again. So they began with beer, lite beer, building to the darker strengths and finally into bourbon – a manly, non-European drink. All through the escalation they talked about how many coincidences had invaded their lives since they had managed to secure tenure of some sort at Curlew. 

“And the first three digits with the first alpha of my pass in were the same as my driving licence with a single, unifying digit subtracted…”

“And the key sequence for the Fermilab logon is three digits removed from my mother’s birthday, which was three digits (in the other direction) off the date of her death…”

“And the long and lat positioning for my room at Curlew is the same sequence exactly as the directory number I had at Oxford”

These coincidences bounce around, being carried away in fragments by the other alumni and staff who orbit them in an abstract and apparently unconnected manner as they drink. From time to time over the five hours during which  they move from respected heads containing impenetrable truths to specularly vapid males with heads full of conspiracy, they work out that something was very up indeed. 

“There was an inevitability about it when you trace the numbers down”

“The numbers are noise, the conspiracy has nothing to do with the numbers, the numbers were put there to put anybody off the scent.”

“The numbers are the human error of it all. They were put there subconsciously by a group of individuals who felt some kind of guilt… it is random noise – as random as it is possible to get – we are supposed to be presented with the existence of the scent by the numbers.”

The private hospital room is much, much better. He has ordered three televisions and a laptop, some books on string theory and a selection of sub-teen girls magazines. The Fat Man is called Abraham Roquez Durer and he is eating spinach and beef calzone, ensuring that nothing drips into him by draping several cotton towels over his torso. He is leaning on three pillows that are already at an angle due to the tilt of the bed. He is watching Ren & Stimpy, CNN and Asia Pacific News BBC World News. He would be dictating a memo into a digital voice recorder that will turn his words into bits and bytes and email them to the ghosts back at the main office in Oregon. But he can’t because he is concentrating on excavating the calzone. 

He was born in Ireland, in Waterford, thirty eight years before and uses the accent when he needs to. His parents relocated to Brisbane when he was twelve years old. Being uncomfortable in the Queensland heat, he remained inside their waterfront house until he was eighteen, when he moved to Sydney as fast as the cash he’d made share trading on the Internet would allow. Once in Sydney, he had found a three bedroom flat just off Broadway with a view of Centrepoint and air conditioning. He enrolled at the University of New South Wales where he discovered that no one was as intelligent as his mother or father. He set out, with more money earned on the Internet, serving stolen hardcore images using the university’s bandwidth, to organise a group of impressionable peers into a proto company publishing street magazines about bands, and DJs; cafes and raves. Many of the events and people they wrote about didn’t exist outside his head. He told his “friends” and “partners” in the company that these random pieces of information would bring people together; their readers would head to Randwick or Liverpool or Surry Hills looking for “Sensei-sational Time Kicking Trace Nite” and find nothing other than themselves, they would “get it” and begin their own parties. 

His friends believed him and came up with more and more outstanding and outrageous characters and events – even interviewing a character called Slamma Mamma on three occasions about why her events always seemed to be cancelled. He sub-let some of his friends to poster areas of Sydney with real information about real events. All the while he spoke of revolutionary sociology and life-changing human dynamics.  He quoted Ken Keysey quoting Neil Cassidy quoting Jack Kerouac quoting Buddha. He siphoned off the money to property accounts in Canberra, Bali, Darwin and Melbourne. 

With his degree course finished, he opened a fully fledged office in Alexandria (which appealed to his sense of classical history) and then left to visit Europe for two years. This was  no big deal as by then he had parted company with his closest female co-partner and discovered the cool of the blond, china-faced woman. She ran the office with indifferent fear, sacking and encouraging others to hire, moving the focus (on his order from a hotel in Paris, a room in London or a train travelling through the Balkans) from street magazines to research work for record companies, software houses, TV companies and street magazine companies. By the time he returned, there had been two walk outs by “senior” staff and a layer of managers who knew the short term score had been appointed, all fresh from overseas or interstate.

He congratulated her with a bottle of white wine, a case of low tar cigarettes and $6,576.55 into her hand from his pocket. He told her to take two weeks off, try to smoke less grass and be back with five new ideas. Then he sat in a glass office overlooking the central atrium of the Alexandria office and went through the spreadsheets with the kind of tooth comb you’d use with a corpse you had murdered. He didn’t want to actually move anything, or even show that he’d tidied the figures, it was simply that there was money there that would serve a greater good if it was in bricks and mortar. This entailed ensuring that at least three of the new management layer found their ways out of the company. 

This was a simple enough strategy to realise seeing as they’d only know him as legend or email. He called meetings at five in the afternoon on Friday, turned up late for them or cancelled them. He pitted them all against each other by pretending not to know names, ignoring emails, making speculative phone calls to voicemail. He ferreted through directories and changed documents. He had a ball and kept making money.

One sticky moment came when one of the management drones, a chap called Dams who was researching the financial history of electricity companies in NSW, had flipped in his office. Abraham had redefined this guy’s workload five times in three weeks, cancelling projects and taking staff to vaporous lines of enquiry. He’d got the guy to sack his closest colleague at nine AM on a Monday morning.

Now the guy, who had a name and a wife and was starting to engender some loyalty (asking for pay rises for ghosts), had broken up like a barnacle ridden fishing boat in the wrong sea in the wrong weather. 

“Just what is your vision for this company? I thought I understood it, but  I can’t get it?”

The fat man hated visions; visions were the bailiwick of martyrs and insane, female European religious figures. His company was there to make money not realise visions.

“I have no vision, this isn’t about vision,” his face grew red, his eyes dilated (not just his pupils, but the entire cavity including the vitreous body and probably the optic nerve all the way to the back of his head over his brain stem), he ran his hand over his exsanguinated forehead and stood up, “this is about reacting. If you have the money to pay our tax bill then you can have any vision you want. Your job is to get work done, understand the audience (by which he meant “client” by which he meant “mark”) and present information on time that will make us money. This isn’t a crusade, this is a business!” He was shouting outside of himself, inside he was watching and waiting for the guy’s good manners and understanding of business ethics to proffer a resignation for him. He was thinking about the other guy he had poached from the day before at short term more money and long term less. He was thinking about lunch at an Italian restaurant in fifteen minutes alone with the newspapers and a calculator. 

“Well fuck you, you fucking cunt. You are a fucked up… you fuck with people,” the guy stood up and faced Abraham off over the desk, slamming his flat hand on a printed email  from his soon-to-be replacement so that some of the cheap toner came off the cheaper paper onto his sweaty hand.

“Fine and fucking dandy. No vision. But  no figures either, the spreadsheets make no sense at all. How can we budget for anything when the spreadsheets are all utter bullshit? I am bewildered, honestly although I don’t expect you to understand that you fat fucking thief!” He was screaming now, and had Abraham’s lapel in his hand. Spit was spraying from his mouth and his skin had washed pale as the anger became too actual for the blood to reside anywhere other than in his arms and legs. His heart was attempting to maintain some parity with the needs of his adrenal gland. 

Abraham saw the signs and started shouting for help. No code words,  a simple au secours to the blond woman, who immediately called a private security firm preferring not to contact the police.

They’d pre-agreed this some years before in a fun game of watching the angles.

What really pissed him off was that he hadn’t pre-empted the reaction of this particular guy. He was slipping and this meant that he had to exert some physical force in order to retain the power position. Well, okay so he didn’t have to, but it was fun in its own way. He didn’t seek out situations wherein he could indulge in bashing people, however, if one presented itself, he was well prepared to smack the hell out of anyone who put him to the challenge. This was made even easier by the fact that everything else in his persona suggested that he was an abject coward. 

This situation was trickier than a standard slap and run. If it did get to court, the fact that he’d beaten the guy half to death with a relatively inexpensive piece of office furniture combined with the fact that the guy had been recruited by a highly respected head hunter who would be more inclined to provide character references than shut up, could mediate against him. On the other hand, it might not get to  court in the first place. 

By the time they woke the next day was already half over. The primary focus for the conversation among the three physicists was optimal hangover cures. There was some argument about whether optimal meant losing the bulk of the hangover quickly enough so that one could be basically functional, or it meant losing the hangover completely. Obviously, losing it quickly and completely was the answer, but they squabbled anyway.

Money was blowing all over the street in front of the bank. It was blowing all over the street in front of the store and the school. Money was blowing all up Grant Avenue, down Sills Street, and money was whirling around the traffic lights at the intersection of Brown Street, Croyd Road and Bellinger Road.

The staff at Kerrigan’s Bar and Restaurant were throwing Kerrigan’s lottery winnings away again.

Out it came like expensive ticker tape, into the air, floating to the ground. Well, almost to the ground, most of it was gathered up in butterfly nets by the visitors to town whose turn it was to benefit from the largesse. Orderly queues and a stacking system had been in place for some months by this point; people were very courteous, relationships were formed.

Kerrigan had won the Lottery 57 times, straight. Entire primary and secondary companies had been set up around Kerrigan’s winnings when it became clear that nothing illegal was happening. That was after Week 15. Despite highly educated and completely expert opinions from the best of minds, the economy stubbornly refused to collapse under the regular showers of liquidity from the upper floor windows of Kerrigan’s.

Despite mile upon mile of commentary online and off from the most informative of the informed social and cultural commentators about how this kind of singular chance would soon result in popular revolt, the People insisted on continuing to purchase Lottery tickets, week-in and week-out even though by week 30 they knew that only one outcome was likely.

Until Week 15 none of the wins had been any less than £106,000,000, and none had been made generally public. However, as soon as the legality of her continuing winning streak had been established, Kerrigan’s mind changed with regard to publicity and she had agreed that the world was about ready to find out.

On the bright and wintery morning of her 82nd birthday she had informed the Lottery people of her decision. She then called around to see Mir Andrew Moffat at the Express and Gazette newspaper in town and she, “gave the old bastard the scoop of this life.”

The Lottery sent its best Public Relations people down to the town in what had been an arduous plane and hire car slog that took up almost two days. They had strategized and shared war stories about ungrateful, ignorant, vile little journalists. They had assured each other that as gatekeepers it was their task to ensure that the best of all truths were made available. They were an efficient team. They pulled together. Nothing got in their way.

At 82 years of age, Angela Kerrigan was stood slender, straight and tall at five feet and eight inches in her flat shoes. She was silver haired and acid tongued. She vaped. She vaped a lot. She was shrouded in vanilla flavoured steam most of the time. She had explained to her local YouTubers, Toby and Ellen Moran, that they should, “Stop asking dumb fucking questions.

“How do I feel about all this winning? I feel cheated. All this dumb fucking luck and I’ve got no time left to enjoy it as far as I can tell. I feel like God is a cheap joker, a buffoon who plays pranks to show off his all powerful being. And you can most certainly quote the fuck out of me on this, for what it’s worth.”

They most certainly did. But they moved on to more newsworthy articles within a few hours. Their video went wild; scifi horror virus viral. Mad times. Toby and Ellen couldn’t count the money fast enough. They bathed in the scorch-light of their success, they enjoyed every single second.

Kerrigan didn’t. She died three weeks later, one week before the events unfolding now. She died of lung cancer, she was quite aware that it was coming at her. It pissed her off because she knew that no matter what she tried to do in order to defeat her own cellular growth, she was going to fail. She had too much remission, too many remissions.

Her cancer was inevitable and when it eventually came, it was unremitting. She had spent many decades smoking cigarettes, joints and cigars. She had surrounded herself with other people who did the same.

She was cremated and her ashes scattered half around the statue of the unknown soldier (“I knew him, the beast, the lovely, sweaty fucking beast”); and half at the front bar of her own place (“right under my stool”.)

He thought he was a Christ, he wasn’t but he wished he was because being Christ – ‘a’ or ‘the’ – was a great deal more interesting than being Jonathan Craig Brewster Baynes of Whitchurch Avenue. Jon wasn’t mad in the sense of insanity, he was simply bored. Very, very bored looking out of the bedroom window, looking along the hollows of Whitchurch Avenue.

The church at the northern end of the avenue was haunted by the ghosts of a 16th Century nun and monk who had been executed for love. They were buried just outside the grounds, their souls leeching as one into the River Whit. Everybody knew that. Everybody knew that since they were four or five years old. It was an old man’s, dull story by the time you hit 20 years old. Christ, or Jon was 32.

The pub at the southern end of the avenue used to be haunted by alcoholic men.

Jon sighed deeply and looked at the house opposite. Partially concealed by a beech tree, which was denuded by the season, it was almost exactly the same as Christ’s.

The only major differences were that Christ’s door was black not red. Christ’s had no curtains in the windows, there were blinds.

The house opposite was inhabited by students, quiet ones. He was on nodding terms with two of them. It was a nice neighbourhood, most of the burglaries happened about 500 metres away. Most things happened 500 metres away.

Jon or Christ imagined being a burglar, dressed in black, off to steal from the posh; to steal romantic gifts, to teach the nobs a lesson. A sleek burglar, handsome burglar. Not a desperately lonely drug addict in search of something, anything, to sell to feed his habit, help him forget his life.

Jon imagined himself shimmying up one of the many drainpipes of a grand house. Leaping from the roof down to a bedroom windowsill, hanging on by his fingernails, hauling himself up and levering the window open with a specialist tool he’d designed himself.

He rapidly, silently and with great muscularity pulled himself into the room. He crouched down and scoped out the room with his superb night vision.

He collected all the jewellery, and left his iPhone with a great collection of music. From the window, he flicked his business card (the Jack of Hearts) onto the sleeping beauty. It landed perfectly on her forehead, causing her dream to take a romantic turn.

He efficiently and rapidly made his exit with animalistic muscularity. He dropped from windowsill to windowsill and then to the ground before sprinting off to his powerful motorcycle and off into the night.

Back in the real world, he continued looking out of the window.

Shortly he was joined by his massive tabby cat, ‘Shorty’, who had woken up and needed company. Shorty was a rescue cat who had grown in just a few weeks from fluff-ball into room conquering giant with no sense of personal space or cat reserve.

Shorty may as well have been a dog. He growled at Christ, who tickled him under the chins before returning his gaze to the Avenue where two students were having an argument beneath the denuded beech tree.

“Well, Shorty, it looks as if they’re having a set-to over there.” The cat growled and slapped Christ on the cheek as playfully as it could.

Two students were yelling at each other. Each one was skipping from foot to foot, trying to prod the other in the chest.

Neither Christ nor Shorty could hear what the argument was about.

“Whatever it is, it’s got them well and truly riled up”, Christ told the cat, who nodded and purred at the sight of such cute conflict.

The problem for the students was that one of them was a gangly six feet three and a bit tall while the other was touching five foot. Most of their argument was getting lost in the space between. This didn’t stop them attempting to slap each other in the doggy-paddle style familiar to those unfamiliar with punching.

Christ looked away. He imagined himself as the peacemaker. The man of wisdom and consoling sentiments. Two sides to every story. Look at this from the other person’s point of view. In the great scope of history, is this really worth all your energy and all this violence?

The next sound was the cat-flap slamming shut as Shorty left the building.

Christ returned to looking out of the window into the avenue. Winter birds, magpies (they never seemed to leave) flitted from bare branch to bare branch. A small car drove towards Churchend. The wind got up, then calmed down, the slamming of the cat-flap indicated the return of Shorty.

Hours passed. Hours were yet to pass. Jon turned the television on: Hitler, Hitler, Cooking, Quiz Show (Winston Churchill, Arsenal, Star Trek), afternoon soap (slap, kiss, weep, fall), a movie (requited love), a based-on-a-true story movie (slap, kiss, weep, fall, brave battle with spinal injury, god, wedding, bliss), sport, sport, sport, cooking, sport, Hitler, alien pyramid builders, gossip, news, news, news, sport, sport, sport.

As Hitler was giving a badly subtitled speech, the students came out of the house. They were holding hands and had changed into different hats: knitted vaginas.

The wind picked up, blowing the mulching leaves around the dank puddles. The vicar cycled along the road, on his way to the pub, the sun set behind the beech tree.

Christ turned around and wheeled himself into the kitchen. Two hours to go until someone arrived to help him bathe and go to bed.

“It’ll get easier”, he told himself before returning to his imagination.

“Carry me quickly to the last place you remember us being happy together,” was the last thing Curran had written. There it was on the note paper that I took from the envelope on the day we buried him. On the envelope he’d written, ‘To You All You Know Who You Are!’.

He was buried in the one suit he owned, a grey, wool single-breast. He’d popped the note into its inside pocket before going out into town for his last night. The undertakers found it on the Tuesday before the Wednesday burial. As ever, too late for Curran.

The thing with Curran was that he was forever leaving notes about the place. The beginnings of poems and stories, rehearsals for suicide notes. Oftentimes you simply couldn’t tell exactly what he meant.

He had worked for two years on the railway doing a variety of jobs. He was tall and slim, dark, he wore spectacles and what used to be known as stout boots. He was an atheist and a small drinker but only on Fridays.

He was my friend and I was his and I will miss him when it’s all sunk in, been soaked up. Curran emerged from prison in 1882 as a rumpled, old man, convinced that his job as the Chaplin was the cause of his loss of faith. He came directly to my grandiose home to remind me of our childhood together. He impressed on me that his “swiftian descent into religion” was the only reason that my late wife, Mary, was my wife and not his.

To an extent, of course, he was correct.

Mary, Curran and I had revolved around each other before he had taken up the holy orders. Mary had taken up my hand, I think, out of heartbreak. I didn’t care. I adored her with all the adoration I had. Forty years after his death, it rankles more than I can bear that Mary and Curran loved each other so much.

She was my friend and we had this glorious house. We had two children – both boys, now men – both abroad and doing very well. I talk to her ghost about Curran. It’s a relief that I no longer need to hide the fact that Curran murdered her father. She’s got to know by now. I wonder what happened when the three of them got together in the afterlife.

Dear June, the flying people with the big ideas have come back to my home again. They’re not inside yet. They’re at the windows and doors, the chimneys and the gaps in the slates. They’re too weak to get in right now. Nevertheless it remains unpleasant to watch them, it’s doubly unpleasant to hear them. 

They shit on the windowsill, and then they eat their own shit. Then they grin because their own shit is also their own, their best idea, of what ideas are. They express their hateful ideas with louder voices than I, in my current state of flux, am able to express mine. Their constant, underlying threat of violence is apparent to me. I spend most of my time trying to be inconspicuous.

They are winter creatures. They flap their huge, in relation to their body size, grey speckled wings. They land on the roof, into the wall ivy, onto the lawns – front and back – and onto the windowsills. Then they wait until I take a telephone call or I speak one of my emails out loud into the computer.

They find flaws and they “Kraaaw! Kraaaaaw! KraaaAAW!” with each other and at me. I can hear them through the triple glazing that you had installed last year at your own expense (thanking you as always).

They take it in turns to peck at the tawdry, mundane details of my life and work. In so doing they miss the long view, the divine. They only want what they want. There’s no reasoning with them. I’ve tried to learn their filthy language but I’m just too weak (you know me). 

They only ever ask the questions that they think they have the answers to. They have no curiosity. They are shouting and screaming and they are violence machines, physical and otherwise. They want to exsanguinate me, I know it. They are terrified of death because the afterlife is waiting to judge them. I know this. I say my prayers and get answers, that’s how. The priest agrees with me in the confessional, that’s how I know it. He gives me acts of contrition, so it must be true.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

pray for us sinners,

now and at the hour of our death. 

Amen.

There is no peace for them, so there must be no peace for anybody. That’s their reasoning. I just know it and the priests agree. It seems as if there’s a new priest every week nowadays don’t you think? So, they are back at the windowsill, my windowsill and they are trying to get it and scream at me. Not the priests, you understand. Just the flying people.

Those glorious headphones you bought me last season (thanking you) because I knew that I couldn’t take another god-knows how long of their interminable shrieking are not working. Please can you seek out more, you are so good with that kind of thing and I am awful. I get confused, you know that. 

I yearn for the good times, the better times at least. The summer months when they’re gone. Well, those times are for higher, more exhilarating activities. I would love a holiday. A winter holiday in the warm. Maybe they won’t follow. Could you, would you look into this, dear June. Dear sister-wife?

You, I know, have counselled me against what you call my whimsies, using parables and fairy tales, that I have to admit were too wearing for me to have paid attention to. I love you so for trying. I love you with what is left to me of my heart and soul. Please come and visit me soon.

Our ancestors built this house to expand our family and its interests in every way possible not to hoist shutters or hang extramural doors (Darling June, is ‘extramural’ the correct word? I no longer understand these things). My ancestors did this because of the decades of the bureaucracies and citizens and locals

By the way, the irony of raising barriers and engineering locks of more and more intricate constructions to ensure or at least prolong our freedoms is not lost on me. I detest having to do it and, had I any remaining strength, I would. However, that is the case. Can you please talk to your handyman for me. As you know I am too shy. I will arrange for a week away at the coast while they work. I’m sure the flying people will not bother a simple, working man.

I just wish more of our group, our clan, family, click, clique, our sort of people would do more to help. I really do.

I must close now because they’re back again. The flying people. They’ve come to mock me and stab at my words and feelings and my memories are ragged. Aside from you, dearest June, my family is of no practical use. As you are aware we do not talk to each other because it causes us or has the potential to cause us unnecessary pain and suffering. 

They’re on my windowsill now, upstairs. Tapping and crashing at the fragile glass. My bedroom is no good any more. I am sure that they have got into the house downstairs. Cook has left the door open. Deliberately. I know it. The filthy woman!

Oh, my dearest June, please, please as you promised you would, please come and rescue me from their Kaaaaw Kaaaaw Kaaaaawing! Their incessant criticisms.

Your loving brother-husband, your servant and worshipper, 

Jean Paul