Spine

This morning I woke up from a terrible dream. I sat up in bed so sharply I damaged my Spine.

“Ow!” said my Spine.

“Ow?” I said.

“Yes! You just headbutted me!”

“But you’re on the shelf, how could I have headbutted you? I would have headbutted the shelf first. That makes no sense.”

“Well, you did, alright, that really hurt.”

“But you’re only a spine! You’ve got no nerve endings, you can’t feel pain.”

“Well, you’ve given me a voice, haven’t you? It’s not like I’m completely devoid of personality.”

This was the nub of the matter, really, wasn’t it? My Spine, while not the most rounded of creations, had a number of talents, such as a voice and a degree of personality. Still it lacked a mouth, a history and motivation, arms, a need for sleep. Most nights it perched on the shelf above the bed, reading books. And still more, it functioned reasonably well, in terms of intelligent conversation, despite the absence of those parts normally assigned to creations.

“Stop narrating, I’ve clearly got minor scoliosis here!”

“Scoliosis is related to muscular distortions in the back, so you can’t have that. Anyway, you don’t have a cortex, or neural pathways. A spine is just a casing for protecting more important functions in the body.”

“Way to go to make a pet bone structure feel great, asshole.”

“Since when did you start appropriating American slang?”

“I watch enough films over your shoulder, it’s not like there’s much else to do.” Oh accusatory creation! When did I give my Spine permission to make me feel guilty?

“I heard that!” My Spine lay aside the book it had been reading and, while I paused to consider how it had achieved this feat of mind-reading, followed by how it had managed to lay aside a book without the necessary bits, it continued with, “So anyway, now that you’ve damaged me, why don’t you tell me what woke you up like that. And straighten me out while you’re at it.”

I proceeded to realign my Spine’s column, which was only marginally off from the vertical plane, so clearly nowhere near warranting a disorderly medical description, while recounting the dream I had had.

“Let me see. At first it was a nice dream. I was wondering through a city made of various metals, sometimes reminiscent of the inside of a laptop, or those animations you see in sci-fi films of the inside of cyber-networks. The architecture of the city was wonderfully neo-classical, that perfect balance of Roman columns and digital screen technology, like Gladiator crossed with Minority Report.”

“Both films I haven’t seen,” my Spine interrupted. “In any case, temporal comparisons of that nature date your work and limit your reader’s ability to relate to your experiences.”

“Well, I watched them before I got you and found I’d created a malign internal critic. Anyway, let me finish. It started to get quite disturbing – the dream, I mean, not you.” My Spine grimaced, but prompted for me to go on, in a non-verbal fashion that I have often found disconcerting, but no longer question.

“A voice started coming through on the loudspeaker system in the city, public announcements. As the announcements came through, people began to shed layers.”

“You didn’t mention any people. Nor the layers they were wearing.”

“I was describing the city until you interrupted. Stop interrupting and I’ll tell you the details in full.”

The Spine sulked, describably, but unfathomably.

“So, the people... Yes, each announcement seemed to strip them of a layer – first their hats, or helmets, scarves and gloves, or whatever accessories they had on. It was like watching a virtual avatar-builder select and deselect accessories.” The Spine didn’t appreciate this reference, either, but I ignored it. “Their shoes, jewellery, their belts. Then their clothes – first the outer layer, then their underwear. For a very short moment I thought the dream was going into some interesting psychosexual territory,” – the Spine made an expression I couldn’t possibly put into words, but I continued despite – “but then the next announcement came and took off their skins. Suddenly I was staring at a whole load of medical text book diagrams of musculature. It was disgusting, trails of blood everywhere. The people kept doing what they were doing, window-shopping, buying pastries, sweeping streets, patrolling policemen still with their hands resting where their belts should have been.”

My Spine said nothing, not even a denigration of the sexualised frisson I’d experienced, which seemed suspicious, but I kept talking.

“Then their muscles and ligaments were torn away by the announcements. They were just skeletal frames wandering around the city with organs unnaturally suspended in ribcages. I looked at my own hands and they were still normal. I tried to focus on the language of the announcements coming through the loudspeakers, but had to assume that they were in the city’s native language and, as an outsider to the city, I couldn’t understand them, nor be affected by the commands to discard my skin. And then the next announcement stripped them down to the bare bones.”

Still no judder or oscillation from the Spine, not even an impossible shrug. I thought I might have riled him with the reference to the ‘sparseness of the skeletal’, which he always countered with a short lecture on the beauty of minimalism and accusations of bonist prejudice.

“But then, things got even stranger. The announcements continued and began to remove, bone section by bone section, the parts of the skeletons! It was wonderfully strange to my dream self, as an observer, and a part of my dream self considered that the people would finally be reduced to nothing.” I paused, thinking, scratched my head.

“Well? Did they disappear?” my Spine asked, in what seemed to me a too-casual tone.

“No. No they didn’t. First their hands and feet. Then their arms and legs. Then their ribcages disappeared, bone by bone as the announcement performed a kind of piano scale in alien syllables. Then, simultaneously, the hip bones and skulls popped out of existence.

“There was a pause to the announcements in which I heard a strange rustling sound emit from the speakers, like pages being turned, reminding me of chips wrapped in newspaper. All these disembodied spines, not unlike yourself, floating about, going about their business, impossible to describe. And then, one final, terrible announcement in my own language: ‘THE PURE PERFECT SOCIETY: DESTROY THE FLESHED!’ the announcement screamed, and all the spines turned to me and rushed at me, as if their movement in my direction alone, like the point of a million fingers manifested in accusation, would destroy me! It was horrible, accompanied by a rush of adrenaline and fear. And then I woke up.”

I sat up properly, tugged my legs over the edge of the bed, turned to my Spine. “What do you think it means?”

“Hmm.” said my Spine.

At that point, I noticed the book my Spine had been reading. I grabbed it.

“Hey, that’s not yours!” it shouted, but for once found no gesture to stop me.

“What do you mean it’s not yours? I created you, so I created it! What is this anyway? ‘Towards a Flesh-free Society: Schema for the Construction of the Pure-Spine Society’?”

The Spine whined and begged me not to read it, but now I was furious. I flicked through. Chapters on how to indoctrinate humans – what the book referred to as ‘Flesh-bags’ – into discarding their meaty coils and stripping down to the pure form of the spinal curve. The process of stripping the flesh from humans, layer by layer, was described exactly as it had occurred in my dream! Chapters on NLP techniques, on hypnagogic methodologies, on the correct use of scalpel and even a chapter on telekinesis, with a section on the ‘Unzipping of the body’s largest organ’ – the skin!

“This is the spinal equivalent of an Al Qaeda handbook!” I screamed.

“It’s just a bit of fun!”

“Sure it is!” I replied, flicking by chance onto a chapter titled, ‘What to do if your Flesh-bag owner discovers this book’. “And I supposed if I shout, ‘Fun? FUN?’ at you, you’ll reply with something like –”

Turning to the next line in the chapter’s script, I read, in unison with my Spine, “Well, it’s your fault for not respecting my independence of thought.”

I jumped in before he could continue with the rest of the chapter’s dialogue. “Oh, so you’ve got it all figured out, have you? Anyway, what kind of idiot writes a chapter telling you what to do if this book is found, as if the person who’s found it won’t read that chapter first of all?”

“It’s not a serious book! It’s just a way of getting attention! You never spend any time with me. You even damaged me this morning and treated me like it was my own fault.”

“Well it sounds like it was your own fault! You’ve been feeding insane dystopian ideas into my dreams.” I was running out of energy for this conversation.

“I’m running out of energy for this too,” it replied with a tinge of morbidity that, for once, suited its aspect. “It’s not just the attention, you know. It’s history, motivation.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve given me a voice, sure, and a bit of personality, but it’s not like you’ve given me any real narrative to fit into, to express myself in.”

“So you think you can claim these for yourself, do you?”

“Don’t be so naive,” my Spine said, “you know as well as I do that all your characters come with these things already in place. Just because you’ve not imagined them yet, doesn’t mean they don’t have further depths to them. It’s not my fault you don’t have the stamina to keep things going, to make all your creations three dimensional.”

“Are you saying my creations are two-dimensional?”

“Hell, I’m a spine. It figures I’d know how to spot a creative bone better than you.”

My anger returned. “Fuck you, Bones!” I shouted, “You’re nothing but a stack of fossilised Lego Bricks!”

“Look at you, spelling out for the reader your emotional reactions, like they’re idiots. You think they couldn’t have recognised from the dialogue that your anger was back? And you forgot the (TM),” it replied, coldly – also with what I might have thought was a touch of menace, though without any body language to go by it was hard to tell.

“What ‘Tee Em’?”

“If you’re to drop references to products like Lego(TM) then you need to acknowledge the registered trademark, legally.”

“Stop being an arse.”

“It’d be nice to have an arse. Or even a coxal. As I was saying, Hoover(TM), Lego(TM), things like that – they’re all products. They don’t describe the hierarchical object, like ‘vacuum cleaner’, or ‘connectible toy building bricks’, they’re specific product ranges.”

“You’re saying I shouldn’t use them?”

“No, just that you need to be aware when you use them.”

I pondered this. Perhaps my Spine had a point.

“You know, as one of your creations, I know what you’re narrating too.”

“Yes, I cottoned on to that when you told me to stop narrating.”

That’s the first sharp thing you’ve done all day, he said, dropping the pretext of an open conversation. Don’t you like our conversations? We don’t really need to have them, though, do we? I’m not bothered about whether we’re talking out loud in your imaginary bedroom, or in the text-room you’ve created for us to inhabit. You make me sound a little bit mad. Well, you make me sound like an abstract clump of bone-parts – you’ve not even described me properly, unless you count the reasonably bonist ‘Lego(TM) stack’ comment. Fine, I’ll describe you. Really? You sure your faculties are up to it?

I stared full length at the sarcastic Spine, which I’d been thinking of all along as mine, but clearly wasn’t. Looking at it was not like looking at a simple medical diagram, or one of those classroom skeletons hanging up like manikins, which students sneak glasses onto when teachers aren’t looking. No, the effect of the disembodied Spine gave it greater resonance, reminiscent of archaeological digs, or a Frida Kahlo painting, as if the spine had been excised from an immensity of art, history and struggle and – yes, even this – from pain, the mortality of flesh that should have surrounded it. Like train tracks, like teeth, like the unrecognisable parts found in treasure hoards, amid piles of gems and rusting coins, or as if the Spine had, solely for its own presentation a need for an entire white beach, washed to the finest grain, with a perfectly still water and a sense of nothing buried in the sands; this Spine was perfect—

Don’t lay it on too thick. Sure. Anyway, don’t you have a novel to write now? Thanks for reminding me, Bonestack.

George Ttoouli : 04 Feb 2010 09:00 |  Tags: Creative Writing |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem