Bigot Hall

SO WHAT

Adrienne found that deja vu could be induced by arranging to have a condescending moron tell her something she already knew. ‘What’s the use of that?’ I asked, threading small predators into my hat and snapping the line.

She explained that the phantom events we recall during deja vu are enclosed in free-floating etheric bubbles squeezed off from the conscious time-stream whenever our time is wasted by vapid louts. She stated that some people had almost an entire lifetime stored up in deja vu timespace to compensate for an existence of abuse and distraction at the hands of the complacent. This much I already understood, and underwent a peculiar feeling of deja vu. But when Adrienne began to describe the fun of accessing and exploiting these auxiliary time nodes, the notion began seeping through the pale foliations of my brain. If several hundred deja vu experiences were lined up in a row and experienced as a seamless stream it would be akin to a clusterbursting hallucination. Whole months of wasted time would be given back to us in a single hit.

Me and Adrienne trooped off to Snapper’s tree and called up. ‘Can we come in, Uncle Snap?’

A shutter opened and Snapper’s vermilion face appeared. ‘A man’s home is his castle, you bastards!’ he yelled. The statement was null and void because although true of Snapper’s home it was untrue of those without defensive artillery.

‘You’re a bundle of nerves, Uncle.’

‘So are we all when our muscle and bones are removed!’

True and obvious, his remark roared us back to the moment at which it had first occurred to us. Adrienne had further to travel, being older, but we seemed to arrive almost instantly at a moment shortly before birth. The sensation lasted just a few seconds but it proved we were onto something.

Ofcourse we couldn’t sit around provoking the drab from Snapper all day — we needed a means of drip-feeding retrogressive data at a steady and constant rate. I happened upon a Hemingway volume in the reading room and found it was perfect. At no point was there the risk of being jarred back into realtime by a new idea — the only problem was that once in deja vu timespace we would probably stop reading. So we asked Professor Leap to read the book into his tape recorder. Sitting in Adrienne’s sanctuary room, we prepared ourselves and switched on the machine.

It was better than we expected. Some of the ideas went beyond the obvious into a kind of homicidal vacuum. I saw a riotous play of lights on my skullwall as the crucifying boredom ricocheted me out of the timestream. In what seemed like seconds I re-experienced the first few seconds of life and all of the author’s ideas, then I was accelerating through a starfield of polymesmeric beauty. Skimming blurseas of red gold and deep flaring gardens, we were thrown across a sky, our shadows darting over the architecture of clouds which were soon streaking into smears. Huge tidal blurs were gashing wounds in space. Half my short life hit me like a thump in the chest as I passed through the sky, making it blink. For an instant, white space was speckled with black stars. I was learning and forgetting at a blur. I lost my body like a broken fingernail. The sparking pattern of passing stars resolved into a white revolving web and then into a sun which was everywhere. The universe opened like a flower, and we were gone. A billion miles below, the self-evident scrapped and sizzled like incinerating trash.

My eyes opened to the room and Adrienne’s dazed, moon-pale face as the tape crackled and ended.