"I want my name to mean me." // (c) lj-user Eril: "I find Asperger syndrome quite sexy."
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
(про книжку)
29. I find people confusing.
This is for two main reasons.
The first main reason is that people do a lot of talking without using
any words. Siobhan says that if you raise one eyebrow it can mean lots
of different things. It can mean "I want to do sex with you" and it
can also mean "I think that what you just said was very stupid."
Siobhan also says that if you close your mouth and breathe out loudly
through your nose, it can mean that you are relaxed, or that you are
bored, or that you are angry, and it all depends on how much air comes
out of your nose and how fast and what shape your mouth is when you do
it and how you are sitting and what you said just before and hundreds
of other things which are too complicated to work out in a few
seconds.
The second main reason is that people often talk using metaphors.
These are examples of metaphors
I laughed my socks off.
He was the apple of her eye.
They had a skeleton in the cupboard.
We had a real pig of a day.
The dog was stone dead.
The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to
another, and it comes from the Greek words μετα (which means
from one place to another) and φερειυ (which means to
carry), and it is when you describe something by using a word for
something that it isn't. This means that the word metaphor is a
metaphor.
I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and
people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and
make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because
imagining an apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with
liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was
talking about.
My name is a metaphor. It means carrying Christ and it comes
from the Greek words χριστος (which means Jesus Christ) and
φερειυ and it was the name given to St. Christopher because he carried
Jesus Christ across a river.
This makes you wonder what he was called before he carried Christ
across the river. But he wasn't called anything because this is an
apocryphal story, which means that it is a lie, too.
Mother used to say that it meant Christopher was a nice name because
it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name
to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean
me.
7. This is a murder mystery novel.
Siobhan said that I should write something I would want to read
myself. Mostly I read books about science and maths. I do not like
proper novels. In proper novels people say things like, "I am veined
with iron, with silver and with streaks of common mud. I cannot
contract into the firm fist which those clench who do not depend on
stimulus." What does this mean? I do not know. Nor does Father. Nor
does Siobhan or Mr. Jeavons. I have asked them.
Siobhan has long blond hair and wears glasses which are made of green
plastic. And Mr. Jeavons smells of soap and wears brown shoes that
have approximately 60 tiny circular holes in each of them.
But I do like murder mystery novels. So I am writing a murder mystery novel.
In a murder mystery novel someone has to work out who the murderer is
and then catch them. It is a puzzle. If it is a good puzzle you can
sometimes work out the answer before the end of the book.
Siobhan said that the book should begin with something to grab
people's attention. That is why I started with the dog. I also started
with the dog because it happened to me and I find it hard to imagine
things which did not happen to me.
Siobhan read the first page and said that it was different. She put
this word into inverted commas by making the wiggly quotation sign
with her first and second fingers. She said that it was usually people
who were killed in murder mystery novels. I said that two dogs were
killed in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the hound itself and James
Mortimer's spaniel, but Siobhan said they weren't the victims of the
murder, Sir Charles Baskerville was. She said that this was because
readers cared more about people than dogs, so if a person was killed
in a book, readers would want to carry on reading.
I said that I wanted to write about something real and I knew people
who had died but I did not know any people who had been killed. I also
said that I cared about dogs because they were faithful and honest,
and some dogs were cleverer and more interesting than some people.
Steve, for example, who comes to the school on Thursdays, needs help
to eat his food and could not even fetch a stick. Siobhan asked me
not to say this to Steve's mother.
19. Chapters in books are usually given the cardinal numbers 1, 2, 3,
4, 5, 6 and so on. But I have decided to give my chapters prime
numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on because I like prime numbers.
This is how you work out what prime numbers are.
First you write down all the positive whole numbers in the world.
Then you take away all the numbers that are multiples of 2. Then you
take away all the numbers that are multiples of 3. Then you take away
all the numbers that are multiples of 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 and so on.
The numbers that are left are the prime numbers.
37. I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was
a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because
I can't tell lies.
A lie is when you say something happened which didn't happen. But
there is only ever one thing which happened at a particular time and a
particular place. And there are an infinite number of things which
didn't happen at that time and that place. And if I think about
something which didn't happen I start thinking about all the other
things which didn't happen.
For example, this morning for breakfast I had Ready Brek and some hot
raspberry milk shake. But if I say that I actually had Shreddies and a
mug of tea I start thinking about Coco Pops and lemonade and porridge
and Dr Pepper and how I wasn't eating my breakfast in Egypt and there
wasn't a rhinoceros in the room and Father wasn't wearing a diving
suit and so on and even writing this makes me feel shaky and scared,
like I do when I'm standing on the top of a very tall building and
there are thousands of houses and cars and people below me and my head
is so full of all these things that I'm afraid that I'm going to
forget to stand up straight and hang on to the rail and I'm going to
fall over and be killed.
This is another reason why I don't like proper novels, because they
are lies about things which didn't happen and they make me feel shaky
and scared.
59. I decided that I was going to find out who killed Wellington even
though Father had told me to stay out of other people's business.
This is because I do not always do what I am told.
And this is because when people tell you what to do it is usually
confusing and does not make sense.
For example, people often say "Be quiet," but they don't tell you how
long to be quiet for. Or you see a sign which says KEEP OFF THE GRASS
but it should say KEEP OFF THE GRASS AROUND THIS SIGN or KEEP OFF ALL
THE GRASS IN THIS PARK because there is lots of grass you are allowed
to walk on.
Also people break rules all the time. For example, Father often drives
at over 30 mph in a 30 mph zone and sometimes he drives when he has
been drinking and often he doesn't wear his seat belt when he is
driving his van. And in the Bible it says Thou shall not kill but
there were the Crusades and two world wars and the Gulf War and there
were Christians killing people in all of them.
Also I don't know what Father means when he says "Stay out of other
people's business" because I do not know what he means by "other
people's business" because I do lots of things with other people, at
school and in the shop and on the bus, and his job is going into other
people's houses and fixing their boilers and their heating. And all of
these things are other people's business.
Siobhan understands. When she tells me not to do something she tells
me exactly what it is that I am not allowed to do. And I like this.
For example, she once said, "You must never punch Sarah or hit her in
any way, Christopher. Even if she hits you first. If she does hit you
again, move away from her and stand still and count from 1 to 50, then
come and tell me what she has done, or tell one of the other members
of staff what she has done."
Or, for example, she once said, "If you want to go on the swings and
there are already people on the swings, you must never push them off.
You must ask them if you can have a go. And then you must wait until
they have finished."
71. All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not
meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are. I'm
meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have
special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning
difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding
relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like
Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening
tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting
fat, or Mrs. Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or
Siobhan, who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you
borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they
have special needs.
139. I like Sherlock Holmes, but I do not like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
who was the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. That is because he
wasn't like Sherlock Holmes and he believed in the supernatural. And
when he got old he joined the Spiritualist Society, which meant that
he believed you could communicate with the dead. This was because his
son died of influenza during the First World War and he still wanted
to talk to him.
And in 1917 something famous happened called The Case of the
Cottingley Fairies. Two cousins called Frances Griffiths, who was
9 years old, and Elsie Wright, who was 16 years old, said they used to
play with fairies by a stream called Cottingley Beck and they used
Frances's father's camera to take 5 photographs of the fairies like
this
But they weren't real fairies. They were drawings on pieces of paper
that they cut out and stood up with pins, because Elsie was a really
good artist.
Harold Snelling, who was an expert in fake photography, said
These dancing figures are not made of paper nor any
fabric; they are not painted on a photographic background -- but what
gets me most is that all these figures have moved during the
exposure.
But he was being stupid because paper would move during an exposure,
and the exposure was very long because in the photograph you can see a
little waterfall in the background and it is blurred.
Then Sir Arthur Conan Doyle heard about the pictures and he said he
believed they were real in an article in a magazine called The
Strand. But he was being stupid, too, because if you look at the
pictures you can see that the fairies look just like fairies in old
books and they have wings and dresses and tights and shoes, which is
like aliens landing on earth and being like Daleks from Doctor
Who or Imperial Stormtroopers from the Death Star in Star
Wars or little green men like in cartoons of aliens.
And in 1981 a man called Joe Cooper interviewed Elsie Wright and
Frances Griffiths for an article in a magazine called The
Unexplained and Elsie Wright said all 5 photographs had been faked
and Frances Griffiths said 4 had been faked but one was real. And they
said Elsie had drawn the fairies from a book called Princess Mary's
Gift Book by Arthur Shepperson.
And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not
want to know the truth.
And it shows that something called Occam's razor is true. And Occam's
razor is not a razor that men shave with but a Law, and it says
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Which is Latin and it means
No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely
necessary.
Which means that a murder victim is usually killed by someone known to
them and fairies are made out of paper and you can't talk to someone
who is dead.
163. [...] And that is why people think that computers don't have
minds, and why people think that their brains are special, and
different from computers. Because people can see the screen inside
their head and they think there is someone in their head sitting there
looking at the screen, like Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek:
The Next Generation sitting in his captain's seat looking at a big
screen. And they think that this person is their special human mind,
which is called a homunculus, which means a little man.
And they think that computers don't have this homunculus.
But this homunculus is just another picture on the screen in their
heads. And when the homunculus is on the screen in their heads
(because the person is thinking about the homunculus) there is another
bit of the brain watching the screen. And when the person thinks about
this part of the brain (the bit that is watching the homunculus on the
screen) they put this bit of the brain on the screen and there is
another bit of the brain watching the screen. But the brain doesn't
see this happen because it is like the eye flicking from one place to
another and people are blind inside their heads when they do the
changing from thinking about one thing to thinking about another.
And this is why people's brains are like computers. And it's not
because they are special but because they have to keep turning off for
fractions of a second while the screen changes. And because there is
something they can't see people think it has to be special, because
people always think there is something special about what they can't
see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black
hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they're scared.
Also people think they're not computers because they have feelings and
computers don't have feelings. But feelings are just having a picture
on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next
year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if
it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry.
229. And when I was asleep I had one of my favorite dreams. Sometimes
I have it during the day, but then it's a daydream. But I often have
it at night as well.
And in the dream nearly everyone on the earth is dead, because they
have caught a virus. But it's not like a normal virus. It's like a
computer virus. And people catch it because of the meaning of
something an infected person says and the meaning of what they do with
their faces when they say it, which means that people can also get it
from watching an infected person on television, which means that it
spreads around the world really quickly.
And when people get the virus they just sit on the sofa and do nothing
and they don't eat or drink and so they die. But sometimes I have
different versions of the dream, like when you can see two versions of
a film, the ordinary one and the director's cut, like Blade
Runner. And in some versions of the dream the virus makes them
crash their cars or walk into the sea and drown, or jump into rivers,
and I think that this version is better because then there aren't
bodies of dead people everywhere.
And eventually there is no one left in the world except people who
don't look at other people's faces and who don't know what these
pictures mean and these people are all special people like me. And
they like being on their own and I hardly ever see them because they
are like okapi in the jungle in the Congo, which are a kind of
antelope and very shy and rare.
And I can go anywhere in the world and I know that no one is going to
talk to me or touch me or ask me a question. But if I don't want to go
anywhere I don't have to, and I can stay at home and eat broccoli and
oranges and licorice laces all the time, or I can play computer games
for a whole week, or I can just sit in the corner of the room and rub
a £1 coin back and forward over the ripple shapes on the surface of
the radiator. And I wouldn't have to go to France.
And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is
very quiet even though it is the middle of the day and I can't hear
any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings
falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic
lights I can hear a little click as the colors change.
And I go into other people's houses and play at being a detective and
I can break the windows to get in because the people are dead and it
doesn't matter. And I go into shops and take things I want, like pink
biscuits or PJ's Raspberry and Mango Smoothie or computer games or
books or videos.
And then I get some dry clothes from the house of a family who are
dead. And I go home to Father's house, except it's not Father's house
anymore, it's mine. And I make myself some Gobi Aloo Sag with red food
coloring in it and some strawberry milk shake for a drink, and then I
watch a video about the solar system and I play some computer games
and I go to bed.
And then the dream is finished and I am happy.
(про книжку)
29. I find people confusing.
This is for two main reasons.
The first main reason is that people do a lot of talking without using
any words. Siobhan says that if you raise one eyebrow it can mean lots
of different things. It can mean "I want to do sex with you" and it
can also mean "I think that what you just said was very stupid."
Siobhan also says that if you close your mouth and breathe out loudly
through your nose, it can mean that you are relaxed, or that you are
bored, or that you are angry, and it all depends on how much air comes
out of your nose and how fast and what shape your mouth is when you do
it and how you are sitting and what you said just before and hundreds
of other things which are too complicated to work out in a few
seconds.
The second main reason is that people often talk using metaphors.
These are examples of metaphors
I laughed my socks off.
He was the apple of her eye.
They had a skeleton in the cupboard.
We had a real pig of a day.
The dog was stone dead.
The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to
another, and it comes from the Greek words μετα (which means
from one place to another) and φερειυ (which means to
carry), and it is when you describe something by using a word for
something that it isn't. This means that the word metaphor is a
metaphor.
I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and
people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and
make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because
imagining an apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with
liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was
talking about.
My name is a metaphor. It means carrying Christ and it comes
from the Greek words χριστος (which means Jesus Christ) and
φερειυ and it was the name given to St. Christopher because he carried
Jesus Christ across a river.
This makes you wonder what he was called before he carried Christ
across the river. But he wasn't called anything because this is an
apocryphal story, which means that it is a lie, too.
Mother used to say that it meant Christopher was a nice name because
it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name
to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean
me.
7. This is a murder mystery novel.
Siobhan said that I should write something I would want to read
myself. Mostly I read books about science and maths. I do not like
proper novels. In proper novels people say things like, "I am veined
with iron, with silver and with streaks of common mud. I cannot
contract into the firm fist which those clench who do not depend on
stimulus." What does this mean? I do not know. Nor does Father. Nor
does Siobhan or Mr. Jeavons. I have asked them.
Siobhan has long blond hair and wears glasses which are made of green
plastic. And Mr. Jeavons smells of soap and wears brown shoes that
have approximately 60 tiny circular holes in each of them.
But I do like murder mystery novels. So I am writing a murder mystery novel.
In a murder mystery novel someone has to work out who the murderer is
and then catch them. It is a puzzle. If it is a good puzzle you can
sometimes work out the answer before the end of the book.
Siobhan said that the book should begin with something to grab
people's attention. That is why I started with the dog. I also started
with the dog because it happened to me and I find it hard to imagine
things which did not happen to me.
Siobhan read the first page and said that it was different. She put
this word into inverted commas by making the wiggly quotation sign
with her first and second fingers. She said that it was usually people
who were killed in murder mystery novels. I said that two dogs were
killed in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the hound itself and James
Mortimer's spaniel, but Siobhan said they weren't the victims of the
murder, Sir Charles Baskerville was. She said that this was because
readers cared more about people than dogs, so if a person was killed
in a book, readers would want to carry on reading.
I said that I wanted to write about something real and I knew people
who had died but I did not know any people who had been killed. I also
said that I cared about dogs because they were faithful and honest,
and some dogs were cleverer and more interesting than some people.
Steve, for example, who comes to the school on Thursdays, needs help
to eat his food and could not even fetch a stick. Siobhan asked me
not to say this to Steve's mother.
19. Chapters in books are usually given the cardinal numbers 1, 2, 3,
4, 5, 6 and so on. But I have decided to give my chapters prime
numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on because I like prime numbers.
This is how you work out what prime numbers are.
First you write down all the positive whole numbers in the world.
Then you take away all the numbers that are multiples of 2. Then you
take away all the numbers that are multiples of 3. Then you take away
all the numbers that are multiples of 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 and so on.
The numbers that are left are the prime numbers.
37. I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was
a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because
I can't tell lies.
A lie is when you say something happened which didn't happen. But
there is only ever one thing which happened at a particular time and a
particular place. And there are an infinite number of things which
didn't happen at that time and that place. And if I think about
something which didn't happen I start thinking about all the other
things which didn't happen.
For example, this morning for breakfast I had Ready Brek and some hot
raspberry milk shake. But if I say that I actually had Shreddies and a
mug of tea I start thinking about Coco Pops and lemonade and porridge
and Dr Pepper and how I wasn't eating my breakfast in Egypt and there
wasn't a rhinoceros in the room and Father wasn't wearing a diving
suit and so on and even writing this makes me feel shaky and scared,
like I do when I'm standing on the top of a very tall building and
there are thousands of houses and cars and people below me and my head
is so full of all these things that I'm afraid that I'm going to
forget to stand up straight and hang on to the rail and I'm going to
fall over and be killed.
This is another reason why I don't like proper novels, because they
are lies about things which didn't happen and they make me feel shaky
and scared.
59. I decided that I was going to find out who killed Wellington even
though Father had told me to stay out of other people's business.
This is because I do not always do what I am told.
And this is because when people tell you what to do it is usually
confusing and does not make sense.
For example, people often say "Be quiet," but they don't tell you how
long to be quiet for. Or you see a sign which says KEEP OFF THE GRASS
but it should say KEEP OFF THE GRASS AROUND THIS SIGN or KEEP OFF ALL
THE GRASS IN THIS PARK because there is lots of grass you are allowed
to walk on.
Also people break rules all the time. For example, Father often drives
at over 30 mph in a 30 mph zone and sometimes he drives when he has
been drinking and often he doesn't wear his seat belt when he is
driving his van. And in the Bible it says Thou shall not kill but
there were the Crusades and two world wars and the Gulf War and there
were Christians killing people in all of them.
Also I don't know what Father means when he says "Stay out of other
people's business" because I do not know what he means by "other
people's business" because I do lots of things with other people, at
school and in the shop and on the bus, and his job is going into other
people's houses and fixing their boilers and their heating. And all of
these things are other people's business.
Siobhan understands. When she tells me not to do something she tells
me exactly what it is that I am not allowed to do. And I like this.
For example, she once said, "You must never punch Sarah or hit her in
any way, Christopher. Even if she hits you first. If she does hit you
again, move away from her and stand still and count from 1 to 50, then
come and tell me what she has done, or tell one of the other members
of staff what she has done."
Or, for example, she once said, "If you want to go on the swings and
there are already people on the swings, you must never push them off.
You must ask them if you can have a go. And then you must wait until
they have finished."
71. All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not
meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are. I'm
meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have
special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning
difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding
relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like
Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening
tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting
fat, or Mrs. Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or
Siobhan, who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you
borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they
have special needs.
139. I like Sherlock Holmes, but I do not like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
who was the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. That is because he
wasn't like Sherlock Holmes and he believed in the supernatural. And
when he got old he joined the Spiritualist Society, which meant that
he believed you could communicate with the dead. This was because his
son died of influenza during the First World War and he still wanted
to talk to him.
And in 1917 something famous happened called The Case of the
Cottingley Fairies. Two cousins called Frances Griffiths, who was
9 years old, and Elsie Wright, who was 16 years old, said they used to
play with fairies by a stream called Cottingley Beck and they used
Frances's father's camera to take 5 photographs of the fairies like
this
But they weren't real fairies. They were drawings on pieces of paper
that they cut out and stood up with pins, because Elsie was a really
good artist.
Harold Snelling, who was an expert in fake photography, said
These dancing figures are not made of paper nor any
fabric; they are not painted on a photographic background -- but what
gets me most is that all these figures have moved during the
exposure.
But he was being stupid because paper would move during an exposure,
and the exposure was very long because in the photograph you can see a
little waterfall in the background and it is blurred.
Then Sir Arthur Conan Doyle heard about the pictures and he said he
believed they were real in an article in a magazine called The
Strand. But he was being stupid, too, because if you look at the
pictures you can see that the fairies look just like fairies in old
books and they have wings and dresses and tights and shoes, which is
like aliens landing on earth and being like Daleks from Doctor
Who or Imperial Stormtroopers from the Death Star in Star
Wars or little green men like in cartoons of aliens.
And in 1981 a man called Joe Cooper interviewed Elsie Wright and
Frances Griffiths for an article in a magazine called The
Unexplained and Elsie Wright said all 5 photographs had been faked
and Frances Griffiths said 4 had been faked but one was real. And they
said Elsie had drawn the fairies from a book called Princess Mary's
Gift Book by Arthur Shepperson.
And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not
want to know the truth.
And it shows that something called Occam's razor is true. And Occam's
razor is not a razor that men shave with but a Law, and it says
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Which is Latin and it means
No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely
necessary.
Which means that a murder victim is usually killed by someone known to
them and fairies are made out of paper and you can't talk to someone
who is dead.
163. [...] And that is why people think that computers don't have
minds, and why people think that their brains are special, and
different from computers. Because people can see the screen inside
their head and they think there is someone in their head sitting there
looking at the screen, like Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek:
The Next Generation sitting in his captain's seat looking at a big
screen. And they think that this person is their special human mind,
which is called a homunculus, which means a little man.
And they think that computers don't have this homunculus.
But this homunculus is just another picture on the screen in their
heads. And when the homunculus is on the screen in their heads
(because the person is thinking about the homunculus) there is another
bit of the brain watching the screen. And when the person thinks about
this part of the brain (the bit that is watching the homunculus on the
screen) they put this bit of the brain on the screen and there is
another bit of the brain watching the screen. But the brain doesn't
see this happen because it is like the eye flicking from one place to
another and people are blind inside their heads when they do the
changing from thinking about one thing to thinking about another.
And this is why people's brains are like computers. And it's not
because they are special but because they have to keep turning off for
fractions of a second while the screen changes. And because there is
something they can't see people think it has to be special, because
people always think there is something special about what they can't
see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black
hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they're scared.
Also people think they're not computers because they have feelings and
computers don't have feelings. But feelings are just having a picture
on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next
year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if
it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry.
229. And when I was asleep I had one of my favorite dreams. Sometimes
I have it during the day, but then it's a daydream. But I often have
it at night as well.
And in the dream nearly everyone on the earth is dead, because they
have caught a virus. But it's not like a normal virus. It's like a
computer virus. And people catch it because of the meaning of
something an infected person says and the meaning of what they do with
their faces when they say it, which means that people can also get it
from watching an infected person on television, which means that it
spreads around the world really quickly.
And when people get the virus they just sit on the sofa and do nothing
and they don't eat or drink and so they die. But sometimes I have
different versions of the dream, like when you can see two versions of
a film, the ordinary one and the director's cut, like Blade
Runner. And in some versions of the dream the virus makes them
crash their cars or walk into the sea and drown, or jump into rivers,
and I think that this version is better because then there aren't
bodies of dead people everywhere.
And eventually there is no one left in the world except people who
don't look at other people's faces and who don't know what these
pictures mean and these people are all special people like me. And
they like being on their own and I hardly ever see them because they
are like okapi in the jungle in the Congo, which are a kind of
antelope and very shy and rare.
And I can go anywhere in the world and I know that no one is going to
talk to me or touch me or ask me a question. But if I don't want to go
anywhere I don't have to, and I can stay at home and eat broccoli and
oranges and licorice laces all the time, or I can play computer games
for a whole week, or I can just sit in the corner of the room and rub
a £1 coin back and forward over the ripple shapes on the surface of
the radiator. And I wouldn't have to go to France.
And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is
very quiet even though it is the middle of the day and I can't hear
any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings
falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic
lights I can hear a little click as the colors change.
And I go into other people's houses and play at being a detective and
I can break the windows to get in because the people are dead and it
doesn't matter. And I go into shops and take things I want, like pink
biscuits or PJ's Raspberry and Mango Smoothie or computer games or
books or videos.
And then I get some dry clothes from the house of a family who are
dead. And I go home to Father's house, except it's not Father's house
anymore, it's mine. And I make myself some Gobi Aloo Sag with red food
coloring in it and some strawberry milk shake for a drink, and then I
watch a video about the solar system and I play some computer games
and I go to bed.
And then the dream is finished and I am happy.