Fremder

2

The fourth of November 2052 was my thirtieth birthday. What happened that morning in the Fourth Galaxy came to be known as the Clever Daughter incident, and after it they kept me at Hubble Straits Space Station for three weeks for a Level 4 Study at Newton Centre. They wanted to know how I’d been able to hold on to the world. When I say ‘the world’ I don’t mean Planet Earth, I mean everything this side of the reality membrane.

My head is full of music: all kinds of songs and fragments of songs, most of them written, sung, and played by dead people. Some of my best friends are dead people.

I like old standards, American mostly, all the way back to the nineteen-twenties. They don’t write songs like that any more, that world isn’t there any more. Once I saw an old documentary with grainy black-and-white footage from 1936, the Spanish Civil War: men running up a hill with bolt-action rifles thinking they were going to do some good.

I took a trip on the train and I thought about you,

I passed a shadowy lane and I thought about you,…

A little strange, a little bringing tears to the eyes, to hear that in your head out beyond the Sixth Galaxy. I’m amazed at how many songs and bits of songs live in my head. And the times when it sings them. Why did it give me ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’ when the jets packed up on a local from Escherville to the Hand of Glory in Schrödinger’s Cat? Or ‘Begin the Beguine’ when the AG slipped its channel and Constanze De Groot took the top off the New Tokyo Sonydome? That morning last November when Clever Daughter and I parted company, however, the music in my head was a much older standard than those.

You know how it is when you’re sitting in a bar somewhere dark and quiet just breathing in and out and maintaining neutral buoyancy and a stranger starts talking to you and after a while he brings out of his pocket a letter coming apart at the creases; he brings out this letter to show you that at one time he mattered more than he does now and he tells you the story of his life. At first you wish he’d go away but perhaps you say to yourself, Maybe one day I’ll want somebody to listen to my story. Never mind. My name is Fremder Gorn. Fremder means stranger in German.