This is not madness.
This is such pain.
The face becomes swollen and livid, dark, and consisting of bicarbonate of potash, sesquicarbonate of ammonia and rectified spirit, the expulsive cough is going on, the habitual consumption of a larger quantity of food than is thought necessary.
When the mind the beloved scenes.
Whilst the beloved scenes.
They may also become enlarged.
IN THE END
In the end, the Lord gave Mankind the world. All the world was Man’s, save for one garden. This is my garden, said the Lord, and here you shall not enter.
There was a man and a woman who came to the garden, and their names were Earth and Breath.
They had with them a small fruit which the Man carried, and when they arrived at the gate to the garden, the Man gave the fruit to the Woman, and the Woman gave the fruit to the Serpent with the flaming sword who guarded the Eastern Gate.
And the Serpent took the fruit and placed it upon a tree in the center of the garden.
Then Earth and Breath knew their clothedness, and removed their garments, one by one, until they were naked; and when the Lord walked through the garden he saw the man and the woman, who no longer knew good from evil, but were satisfied, and He saw it was good.
Then the Lord opened the gates and gave Mankind the garden, and the Serpent raised up, and it walked away proudly on four strong legs; and where it went none but the Lord can say.
And after that there was nothing but silence in the Garden, save for the occasional sound of the man taking away its name from another animal.
GOLIATH
I suppose I could claim that I had always suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a bad cover for something deeper and weirder and infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already knew the truth. But I think that’s just how the world has always been. And even now that I know the truth—as you will, my love, if you’re reading this—the world still seems cheap and shoddy. Different world, different shoddy, but that’s how it feels.
They say, Here’s the truth, and I say, Is that all there is? And they say, Kind of. Pretty much. As far as we know.
So. It was 1977, and the nearest I had come to computers was I’d recently bought a big, expensive calculator, and then I’d lost the manual that came with it, so I didn’t know what it did anymore. I’d add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and was grateful I had no need to cos, sine, or find tangents or graph functions or whatever else the gizmo did, because, having recently been turned down by the RAF, I was working as a bookkeeper for a small discount carpet warehouse in Edgware, in north London, near the top of the Northern Line. I pretended that it didn’t hurt whenever I’d see a plane overhead, that I didn’t care that there was a world my size denied me. I just wrote down the numbers in a big double-entry book. I was sitting at the table at the back of the warehouse that served me as a desk when the world began to melt and drip away.
Honest. It was like the walls and the ceiling and the rolls of carpet and the News of the World topless calendar were all made of wax, and they started to ooze and run, to flow together and to drip. I could see the houses and the sky and the clouds and the road behind them, and then that dripped and flowed away, and behind it all was blackness.
I was standing in the puddle of the world, a weird, brightly colored thing that oozed and brimmed and didn’t cover the tops of my brown leather shoes. （I have feet like shoeboxes. Boots have to be specially made for me. Costs me a fortune.） The puddle cast a weird light upward.
In fiction, I think I would have refused to believe it was happening, would’ve wondered if I’d been drugged or if I was dreaming. In reality, hell, I was there and it was real, so I stared up into the darkness, and then, when nothing more happened, I began to walk, splashing through the liquid world, calling out, seeing if anyone was about.
Something flickered in front of me.
“Hey fella,” said a voice. The accent was American, although the intonation was odd.
“Hello,” I said.
The flickering continued for a few moments, and then resolved itself into a smartly dressed man in thick horn-rimmed spectacles.
“You’re a pretty big guy,” he said. “You know that?”
Of course I knew that. I was nineteen years old and even then I was close to seven feet tall. I have fingers like bananas. I scare children. I’m unlikely to see my fortieth birthday: people like me die young.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Do you know?”
“Enemy missile took out a central processing unit,” he said. “Two hundred thousand people, hooked up in parallel, blown to dead meat. We’ve got a mirror going of course, and we’ll have it all up and running again in next to no time. You’re just free-floating here for a couple of nanoseconds, while we get London processing once more.”