A Familiar Face

The mother looked at her baby. The little one was barely a year old. She took him up, showed him a doll with a bell inside and wriggled it back and forth so it made a sound.

– Look at the little doll, she said. Dolly dolly dolly doll! Ringy ringy ring! Ring! Is it a funny doll? Isn’t it a nice doll? Do you like the doll? Does the doll like you?

The child smiled and took the doll. He shook it back and forth prattling happily. He let go of the doll, which fell to the ground. It was impossible to tell whether he let it go on purpose, just to see what would happen, or if he lost it. He babbled something and smiled a bit wider, but when the doll just remained on the ground, he twisted his face and decided to cry. The mother sighed and bent down to pick it up.

A couple at the next table observed them with increasing curiosity.

The baby stretched out his little arms for the doll, and when his mother finally gave it to him, he laughed and said:

- Grazie! Grazie, grazie, grazie! Grazie mille!

The mother tickled him and laughed with him.

– Yes you got your doll! Are you happy now? Really happy wappy lappy happy? Who got the nice doll? Can you say ”thanks”?

Finally, the woman at the next table could not restrain herself, and with a slight accent she said:

– He just did, didn’t he?

– Did what? the mother asked, surprised.

– He just thanked you, the man at the next table clarified.

– He didn’t, did he? I did not hear it.

– He said ”grazie”.

– And…?

– That’s thank you in Italian, you know.

– No, I did not know that.

– He has been speaking Italian to you all the time, while we have been sitting here.

– Italian? He can’t have.

– I assure you. Is his dad Italian?

– No. I do not know anyone who is Italian. I’ve hardly ever met anyone who’s Italian. I’ve never been to Italy.

– So how come your baby is speaking Italian?

– I have no idea. He can’t be. Are you sure?

– Gianni! Gianni! came a voice from the other side of the square.

A lady with auburn hair was looking around with worried eyes. The baby babbled something and yelled. The auburn lady turned towards them and came running. She said something to the baby, who hugged his doll and babbled something back. There followed a brief discussion in Italian between the auburn lady and the couple, and the man finally turned to the mother.

– She says that this is her child. Could that be true?

– Oh, dear! Not again!

– Again?

– I have prosopagnosia. I do not recognise faces. We have been at a playground, and when I left, I took a child I thought was mine. 

The couple turned to the Italian lady and explained. After a minute, they turned back to the mother.

– She says that there actually was a baby of about the same age with the same little green jacket. From a distance, she at first thought it was hers, but it obviously wasn’t. That child spoke only Japanese. He’s still there.

– Japanese? My child doesn’t speak Japanese. At least not as far as I know. I wonder for how long he’s been doing that.

How to Enjoy Eternal Life

I still remember that day. I had just bought a used mobile phone for my desk at home. It was not even a working phone. Once, someone might have found it useful, but the batteries were not only dead but lost. I needed a paperweight, and this looked like the right thing with a somewhat unusual appealing design, which I had not seen before of a brand I did not know. I put it on a pile of papers, and it fulfilled its purpose, keeping the sheets in place in spite of a soft breeze through the open window. I tried to sit down and waste my time with some unreliable news sites, but I was unable to concentrate because of the reflections from the phone. In the end I decided to cover the screen with masking tape. I carefully attached two strips of tape to cover the screen, but a tiny slit was still free, so I had to add a third strip. With utmost care, to avoid any unseemly wrinkles, I slowly dragged my finger over the tape. Just when I got to the last pixel of the screen, the entire room began to tremble, and an inexplicable darkness covered the windows. I could see that the sun was still shining outside, but the light did not penetrate through the black velvet curtains. All the light in the room came from my newly purchased phone, penetrating the masking tape, as if it had been a stage light, and from the phone rose a rapidly growing figure in a purple turban and a long pink robe.

“I am the genie of the phone,” thundered his voice. “I have been locked in that device by an evil magician, not less than a fortnight ago. I’ll never go to that secondhand market again,” he mumbled. “By covering the screen, you broke the spell. I will now fulfil three of your most ardent wishes.”

“Gee!” I replied. I did not come to think of anything better to say.

“But think carefully,” he roared. “Many are the fools who have wrecked their lives with silly wishes.”

“I want to live forever!”

“What?”

“I want to become immortal. Never die, you know. Quite a downer, most funerals. Wouldn’t like to impose that on others.”

“You have heard of Tithonos?”

“The guy who got eternal life but not eternal youth? Yea. Sure.”

“So you want eternal youth as well?”

“Oh, no. No need for that. I never liked being young anyhow. Uncertain future and all that.”

“You sound like a fool to me.”

“Well, you haven’t lived forever yourself, have you? You cannot really tell what it is like.”

“So be it. I grant you…” There was a fanfare in a jazz chord as if played by three bagpipes. “… eternal life!”

“Thanks. Dashed decent of you. Actually, it does not feel any different. Is that normal?”

“It will feel different in the years to come. Very different. What is your next wish?”

“I want a mind that is able to handle eternity without any pain.”

“Oh… Perhaps, you are not such a fool after all. Well, here it is, the wisdom you perhaps should have asked for as your first wish.” Some chords as from a string quartet that was so beautiful that Poulenc might have written it sounded across the room.

“Weeeee! Yes, that feels different. Let me just think… No, of course not. I’m too clever to need any time to think.”

“So what’s your third and last wish?”

“A really bad memory.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I want a really bad memory.”

“You want to forget everything that has happened?”

“No, no, no. Just an average bad memory you know. I’ll remember some things, but forget many. When I walk into another room, I will quite often forget what I intended to do. That kind of thing.”

“Oh, mortal…!”

“Not any longer!”

“Right… Oh, little idiot!”

“That’s better.”

“I will grant you…” Timpani and trombones and triangles accompanied his last words: “… an average Bad Memory!”

And the genie disappeared in a puff of smoke. At least I imagine he did. I do not remember any longer. It doesn’t really matter. I remember some things, but most of the past is just a haze for me.

Then I began my earthly preparations. I bought interesting books and ripped out all the sheets. I downloaded the most beautiful pictures I could find on commercial websites. Some of them I printed out on paper. Some of them I had carved into stone. I added a fairly large number of statues of wood and stone and put them all in a storage room.

After a few hundred years, human technology had come so far that I could ask a company to send it all out in space together with myself, far away from anything.

A few billion years later, the sun exploded far behind me. The earth was annihilated. Our galaxy collided with another galaxy. Time went on.

The stars went out, one by one. The galaxies dissolved. Some of them were sucked into black holes that then radiated back out into the empty space and faded away. 

Once, I was sucked into a black hole myself. It could do me no harm, of course. I was immortal. I was old and weak. I had lost my hair. My skin was dry and wrinkly. My body had gone through a huge number of different kinds of cancer. But I was immortal. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I was sucked into a black hole. I don’t remember. It was nothing exciting, I guess.

Space was big and dark. Very rarely I was aware of any matter, except my own rocket, which to a normal human eye was as dark as anything anyone has ever been unable to see. The books, the sculptures, the paintings, I had assembled them all into a big ring that slowly rotated. I was sitting still in space, and saw the ring rotate. I saw the Guernica pass by. I read Finnegan’s Wake, page by page as they floated past me. And very soon, I had forgotten all about them. Years passed. Centuries. And all the time, new art, new books passed me on that ring. I knew I must have seen them before, as the ring was finite, but in eternity, one forgets what one has seen, so I could each time enjoy them as much as I had done the previous thousand times I had read or seen them.

It was all dark, but every now and then, a pair of photons would spontaneously form in the vacuum, and every now and then, one of them would hit a painting and then be reflected onto me. It was not often compared to a mortal human’s life. But it was more than enough for a truly immortal experience.

Why I wrote this down? I do not remember. But I assume I have read it thousands of times, and I’m as surprised every time I learn the story of my life.

Ascension Day

Many people considered my neighbour, John Chapper, an odd person. Down the pub, he had the habit of telling other people what to do in general, as if everyone always had to behave the same. “Blessed be the pedestrians who stop for red light,” he would say. Or “Very truly I tell ye, this country deserves better public transport.”

He was a teetotaller, never ordering anything but water and barley loaves in the pub. Nevertheless, he always seemed as drunk as everyone else at the end of the evening. His shirts were of a strange kind that got red stains from water. I guess the fabric was genetically modified. You never know what you get from genetically modified shirts. John happily shared the bread with the rest of us, whether we wanted it or not. He probably just wanted to get rid of it. It tasted like it had been factory made for thousands of people.

One day when visiting the beach, we saw him in the distance.

“Look, isn't that that looney John?” my teenage son said.
“Why is he waving his hands in the air?” asked my wife. “Did he lose a balloon or something?”

We looked up in the sky, but saw no balloon or anything else in particular. The sky was mostly blue. There were some clouds. However, we began suspecting something bizarre was about to happen when there descended a loud voice from an immense cloud, which split open revealing an intense light.

“Behold, this is my nephew, who will ascend and sit at my right side at the final day!”

I have no idea why that voice talked about seating at the UEFA cup. The end game was not for several weeks.

The landscape was flooded by serene music as from trumpets and timpani. My wife thought it was a catchy tune, and suggested we have a dance, but as I only tango, I failed. I did not actually decline to do it. I really tried to tango to the tune, but it was no good. It did not have that cha-cha-bum bits I was used to from the dance lessons.

My son sighed and looked away in embarrassment. At that moment, he apparently had no parents.

The music buzzed on, as John slowly elevated from the ground, his arms stretched out like a bat frozen in mid flight. Plenty of people took out their phones and recorded the event. It was a  really good trick, but he must have forgotten to rehearse the end, because he never came down again. He just disappeared into the open cloud, which closed behind him. We never saw him again.

It was a good trick, though, and I guess several uploaded videos got likes and thumbs ups on social forums the coming days.

Some nuts even suggested this was an act of God, but it was always promptly pointed out that God would have provided much cooler music. The timps and trumpets sound was just lame.

Her Most Loyal Friend

Mary came home after a devastating day at work. The office was at a depressingly isolated old boarding school far out in the countryside. People had yelled at her. People had avoided her. People had fallen asleep during a presentation of hers. 

Her boss had even snored as he was lying, nose down, with his head resting on the table in front of him in the meeting room. That would have been embarrassing if anyone else had been awake, but luckily they weren't. Unperturbed, Mary had gone on talking. She had this feeling that her soothing voice was the safest way of keeping the others asleep, so she could have some time for herself, thinking, resting, while slide after slide passed on the screen. It was only when a cleaning lady came in and interrupted them, way past the scheduled lunch break, that Mary realised that the slide show had restarted from the beginning. Perhaps several times. 

Later on, she had found a colleague of hers, Steve, hiding in a cleaning cabinet to avoid her. Steve had claimed he was looking for a broom, but the door was closed from the inside. The only reason Mary had found him was because she had tried to put away the broom she had found in his office. 

The highlight of the day had been when she got the opportunity to complain about an offensive picture she had found on the company intranet. It was actually quite funny, but she was sure other people would be offended by it. 

Now she was home. Safely home. With the hero of her life. Bob was always there for her. He would never let her down. He would never go out bowling when she needed him. When she wanted to feel his wet tongue all over her face. When she wanted to hear his comforting yelp, as she used the can opener. 

He had dark eyes under bushy eyebrows and ears that were standing almost straight up. Both his back and chest were covered by thick silvery hair. 

He was the fabulous Bob. He may be small and old and not very strong, but she was convinced he would not hesitate to attack any intruder. He had once bitten the postman, but that was just an accident involving an offered sandwich. 

Bob curled up in her lap. She softly tickled his neck, as she thought about the day at work. She had never managed to get that report from Steve. It was as if he deliberately tried to sabotage her work. That must be it, she sighed. He was after some promotion and tried to stop her from getting any threatening recognition. She became more and more angry. 

“Come now, Bob,” she said. “It's time to go for a walkie.”

It was a cool autumn evening, but the fresh air would not calm her down. They walked around the park along dimly lit paths. 

As they turned a corner, she recognised Steve, that most despicable of colleagues. They were both surprised, mumbled some kind of greeting to each other, but then quickly moved on. 

After a few paces Mary stopped. “Steve!” she whispered. “My office arch foe!” Then she burst out louder: “Bob! Attack! Sic ‘em!” And pointed at the shadow that moved away from them around the bend. 

Bob eagerly obeyed. His little legs moved at an incredible speed, as he ran after his prey. Mary heard a scream through the darkness, and after a brief moment Bob proudly came back. 

“Good Bob!” she smiled and patted him on the head. “Did you bite him?”

“Of course not”, said Bob and adjusted his tie. “I pinched his car keys. He won't be able to drive to work tomorrow. Really, Mary. Sometimes, I think you treat me like a dog.”

The Last One of Our Generation

Bob's neighbours were perfectly charming people. They had a neat house and a two year old daughter. The girl loved playing with her teddy bear, her doll house and her smartphone. Actually, she seemed to prefer the smartphone, and she proudly showed Bob drawings she had made on it, which her parents had printed out for her and put on the wall. (By "wall" I mean the physical wall of her bedroom - not any particular section of some social media site.)

This made Bob uneasy, because he did not have any smartphone himself. The blank surface frightened him, and even though they were called smart phones he could not see any way to actually call anyone with it. 

He had reluctantly bought a low end mobile phone a few years ago, when someone at a mall had convinced him that everyone was expected to have one. They also cancelled his fixed phone line,  pointing out that he no longer needed it. 

After some time, the last newsstand in his part of the town closed down, so he could no longer buy newspapers. He took up the habit of going to an Internet café a few times a week to read the latest news. 

His television and his radio had stopped working a few years earlier in a transition from "analog" (working) to "digital" (incomprehensible) emissions. 

He spent most of his free time at home reading the many great classic books he had inherited from his grandfather. Dickens, Balzac, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy and Homer were his favourites, but he also happily read Gogol, Zola, Jane Austen and many others.

When he read articles on the Internet, there were more and more things he did not understand. There were references to musicians he had never heard of, movies he was not interested in and technology he could not grasp.

About the time he retired came another big change in his life. At the Internet café they removed the old computer with a physical keyboard. The staff were very polite and excused themselves, but, they explained, they had kept it only for him. No one else had wanted to use it for years. It was now broken, and they could not find any parts to repair it. 

They tried to explain to him how to use the new input device, but he did not understand half the words they used and none of the meaning. He tried. He touched it. He pressed it. He fiddled and diddled. He cried and he swore. And all he could discern in the stream of helpful advice from the staff was "it is really simple, you know".

In the end, he gave up, had a cup of coffee and left. 

When he got home, he read Finnegan's Wake for a few hours. At least James Joyce understood him.

While Bob now had contact only with the great authors of yore, mankind was busy evolving. New words, new ideas and new concepts were added to all the languages of the world, which rapidly became more and more similar. The Japanese started putting the verb before the object in sentences. The Russians got rid of their genders and the English dropped the definite article. This development was very fast, as everyone was connected with everyone. Except Bob.

One sunny autumn day, Bob was walking in the park. He had bought something that vaguely resembled what once had been called "ice cream", and he enjoyed it on a bench under a tree that probably had some DNA in common with a willow. 

A loud noise broke the peace. He beheld  a flying saucer above. He had had no particular opinion if there was life on other planets, so he was not that surprised. However, looking around he realised from other people's screaming and running that the mainstream opinion was that this was bad news. 

"Greetings earthlings!" said an alien who had been lowered to the ground from the main ship. Bob nodded approvingly. "We come in peace. Bring me to your leader." 

"...to your leader", mouthed Bob at the same time. 

"We have monitored your planet for a long time and learnt your languages from radio waves that have travelled for decades to our home planet."

Some kind of patrol of people who perhaps filled a similar function to the police force of the past approached along the lawn of some herbs that vaguely looked like grass. 

One of them answered the alien. Bob did not understand more than one word: "what?"  The aliens looked at the "policeman", and they were as confused as Bob. 

"I beg your pardon", the alien said. "Does anyone speak English? Habla español? Est-ce qu'il y a quelqu'un ici qui parle français?"

The "police" looked at each other in bewilderment. 

"I speak English", Bob said. "Twentieth century style. Don't worry about them. There is no one else left who speaks fluent twentieth century English. You could try the classics department at a university, but I'm not sure we have anything that resembles universities any more."

"What a dashed nuisance!" the alien said. "We prepared for decades for this contact. Now we have to learn yet another language."

"It is not worth it", Bob reassured them. "They use completely insane concepts. You may as well try to understand what a dolphin wants to say or grasp what opinions a lizard has of quantum physics. Don't waste more time here. Let's just leave."

The alien looked at the confused human "police" and agreed. Bob and the alien left in the flying saucer, and Bob lived happily for ever after. 

Ok. That last bit was just a happy dream Bob had. But he never woke up from it, so that does not really matter. 

Crime doesn't pay enough (part 3 of 3)

Often I had to physically fight intruders, who refused to leave, and more than once I had to spend a few days at a hospital where doctors patched me up. During these stays, I never managed to relax, as I kept thinking about the big risks of someone else finding the romantic invoices.

During this time, I did not have a single day of holiday, unless you count as holiday the times when his lordship travelled abroad and I had to go with him (at my own expense) to protect him against all sorts of unwanted curiosity. We went both to Hawaii, which was very pleasant, and the Amazonas, which was much less pleasant, as his lordship explored different kinds of tropical invertebrates, which fascinated him intensely. Often, during our trips, there was nothing to eat but the local food, something his lordship enjoyed immensely, while it often made me sick for days.

Attempts at raising the black mail amount failed, as his lordship pointed out that he was a very poor man, and there was simply not enough money to pay me anything more. Looking at the trinkets in the manor, I was inclined to believe him.

After seven years, I was exhausted. At the beginning of my employment I had been a young man exploring the possibilities of life. After seven years, I was thin and grey and knackered.

It was at this time that his lordship left us. He left all his money to charity. It was much more than I had imagined possible. There was not a penny to me, of course. I was after all the criminal who had extorted money from him for seven long years. The charity organisation got not only his money, but also the manor, the grounds and all his papers, including one that beyond doubt proved that he was a fraud from beginning to end. He had killed the real lord B many years ago. The handwriting on the invoices from lady F did not resemble the handwriting of the real lady F at all.

That was his real secret. He had only pretended to be blackmailed by me, while in fact he had employed me as a bodyguard to protect his deeper secret, the secret that could have ruined his life completely and sentenced him to a long prison sentence.

I was tired, a mere shadow of my former Special Forces self. Having paid all my travels myself, I was as poor as I had been when I began my black mailing butler career.

But at least I had learnt a valuable lesson. Unfortunately, in my current economic situation, I cannot divulge the actual lesson for free. To learn what it is, send me a package with a large amount of money in small unmarked bank notes, and you will receive an answer as soon as I have spent it.

Crime doesn't pay enough (part 2 of 3)

It was one of the easiest investigations imaginable. When his lordship was out, I sneaked into his room and browsed through his papers. Not among his main piles of letters, but in a separate drawer in the writing table there were letters written in a distinctly female handwriting. I had brought a small camera and took photos of some of the juiciest passages. It turned out to be a lady F, married to one of the big landowners in the next shire. The letters did not contain any romantic drivel, but they were straight to the point. They contained one amount after the other, for this night here and that night there. They were quite simply invoices for romantic services. Lady F was a prostitute and lord B was her (perhaps only?) customer.

There was definitely money in this. I could either sell the story to the press or just exert some classic blackmail on his lordship. I decided to follow the second path, as I considered it a more long term investment.

His lordship was very understanding. He expressed his understanding in tears and prayers that I would never reveal this scandal to anyone. A further sign of his understanding was a sizeable increase in my salary.

My first intention had been to retire and live on whatever money I could get from the old man, but I realised the risks. If it had been this easy for me to discover his secret, anyone else might find out as well, and then the secret would no longer be mine. If a journalist got hold of it, my extra income would cease immediately.

That's why I went for the more discreet solution to stay in his lordship's service but with a much increased salary. That meant that I could make sure no one else approached the incriminating papers.

The snag was that this was much more demanding than I had anticipated. My salary had increased, but so had my workload. The fact that his lordship was such a loner had raised interest in him from journalists and tourists, and every week there were people who tried to penetrate the grounds with cameras big as pikes. I set up an alarm system, making sure I would be able to get them before they came any close to the manor, but the alarm system often woke me up in the middle of the night when deer or wild boars triggered the traps.

(To be continued. Fairly certainly. But no one knows why. Yet.)