The Third Person

There are more copies of An Elegant Ending by Jim Thornton in existence right now than there are tigers. There are more copies of the Bible than there are turtles. The genomes of these books are better at reproducing themselves than the genomes of turtles and tigers. As creatures, they are more successful. The environment that these books have to survive in is our culture, and they have to be good enough survivors to influence us to build more copies of them. If not, their competitors will succeed.

After all, we only have so much space on our shelves.

By the time the coach rolled into Asiago – a quarter of an hour ahead of schedule – I was most of the way through the bundle of society propaganda that Gray had pulled off the net for me, and my brain felt addled. As we eased slowly past the mirrored glass side of the terminal, it occurred to me that I ought to be nervous, but I couldn’t be bothered. All in all, I’d been through a full thirty-five page pamphlet purporting to prove that literature was alive, studied nine pdfs of various leaflets and flyers and read two newspaper articles. One was a two column report on a linguistics convention that Dennison had given a parallel session paper at, and the other was a half-page ‘look at the loonies’ piece in the local press.

In addition to giving papers in support of the cause, it seemed that Dennison had been donating two hundred pounds to them every other month. The articles I’d read made the society seem very active, with outings and demonstrations that bordered on the criminal. An accompanying photograph to the local paper’s piece showed a young woman with a nose stud holding a placard. She had written ‘Censorship Kills’ on it, and the caption beneath read: ‘War of Words: a society supporter stirs up dissent’.

Well, she did look pretty pissed.

I put the papers down and, instead, imagined Amy sitting beside me, like we were on a regular trip to the seaside. On coach journeys, Amy always sat next to me, and she’d usually get tired real quick. So she’d go to sleep leaning on me. Her head would collapse slowly: from my shoulder to my chest, and then to a jerk awake. I’d brush an avalanche of hair from her face, hooking it behind her ears, and she’d snuggle back in, looking all crumpled and dozy.

A soothing voice came on over the coach’s tannoy system.

‘ Please remain seated until the bus has come to rest.’

This was immediately taken as a sign to stand up and begin removing large and unwieldly objects from the overhead storage lockers. Businessmen were levering out enormous, jet-black briefcases, while women extracted baby-sacks and mountainous coats to hide their horrific children in. For all the equality of the sexes, nothing changes – although it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that some of these people were actors, paid by the coach company to give travel a sense of comfort and the everyday. I gathered my papers together and waited.

In the coach station itself, there were no police waiting for me. Nobody even looked twice. There was a small crowd of scattering people, heading this way and that, and another janitor: so like the one in Bracken I wondered for a second whether he’d been stowed away in the luggage department and let off first. I almost hoped it was true. The more likely alternative – that two different people had the same meaningless job of watering down mud on dirty white tiles – was more depressing.

I moved with the throng, swept out into the sunlit streets of Asiago.

In Asiago, the sky is blue.

You have the sea running alongside, and it’s so pure that it looks almost enhanced. It’s all pale blue and white, and you can see sail boats in the distance moving casually across the horizon. Most of these aren’t real. They’re motorised scenery, and they take them in on rainy days because they look too odd. Up close, at the harbour edge, the water’s actually blacky-green and murky, and you can see the oil and branches and shit on the surface.

Take that effect and extend it to the whole town.

In Asiago, the sand is like silk.

No it isn’t. Anyway, forget the sand. What you have – basically – is a manufactured seaside resort, complete with artificial shabbiness. You have penny arcades and souvenir shops and ye-olde-pubs with barrels instead of seats – but the beer’s no better than anywhere else and barrels aren’t comfortable to sit on for a beer-drinking length of time. Everywhere smells of salt and vinegar – and fat – and you’ll remember your parents hinting that, because it’s a seaside town, the fish should be wonderful here. But it turns out not to be. It’s just as battery and boring as anywhere inland.

In Asiago, as they say, the air is like warm, melted ice.

You have the fresh sea breeze, and the warmth of a hazy sun.

Always Asiago.