BROOKE BIAZ, and Brooke's fictional self, GRAEME HARPER

This Week's Story-in-Progress

 

Biography: Brooke Biaz is also Graeme Harper BA MLitt DCA PhD FRGS FRSA, Professor of Creative Writing, Director of the International Centre for Creative Writing Research (ICCWR) and current Chair of the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) UK Higher Education Committee. Brooke/Graeme hold Professorships at Bangor University and the University of Bedfordshire (Honorary). Graeme is also a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council's (AHRC) Panel 3 (PG), Peer College and Steering Committee on Practice-Led Research. Holding dual British-Australian citizenship, they were awarded the first doctorate in Creative Writing awarded in Australia and also hold a second doctorate from the University of East Anglia. Graeme is Director of Research for the College of Arts and Humanities at Bangor University, as well as Director of the National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries. Together Graeme and Brooke have won such awards as the National Book Council Award for New Fiction (Aust.), the NSW Premier's Award for New Writing, the Eastern Frontier Fellowship, and awards, grants and fellowships from the AHRC, British Academy, Australia Council, EU Commission, KEF, NESTA, the Arts Councils of England and of Wales, among others. Graeme also holds degrees in Social History and is a Committee Member of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), of which he is a Fellow, as he is of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). He is also Director of the Institute for Research Leadership in the Arts and Humanities (IRLAH), ARTEFACT, of Creative Lab and of Research Innovation.co.uk.

This, and that, are stories in progress:

 

Station (Draft 9)

 

1

It was kind of Professor Horgan to think up the formula for invisibility, and I have no doubt whatsoever about his genius, but I would like to make a complaint.
Sir,

 

2

What is it with you?

Today I have become invisible. Who ever would have thought? In the big fat station, beneath the big fat roof I have begun, it seems, to un-become. Just as you said.

By rights this, of course, is impossible. After all, until this moment I’ve shown no lack of visible presence, no visually divisible qualities, no absence. I have been, as far as persons go, quite demonstrable. Present. Defined. Material. A shape. A substance. A form. An entity. But here I am, on the way through the station to catch the last train, and, well . . . I’m not!

3

Frankly, Professor, this may cause me a few problems.

I’m on my way home and, home being a small place, and in the way of small places, close knit, I have no idea how I will explain my new condition to friends and family. I’m not complaining about this, per se, but should you have any thoughts they’d be most welcome.

Most particularly, because I am expected to give speeches, because I am requested, in the circumstances of returning home, to stand up and be in some way visually as well as verbally articulate, this will make things worse. And yet, the increasing shallowness and speed of my breathing suggests the situation is almost certainly now irreversible. And it’s getting worse!

I imagine, next, I’ll feel a little light. Correct? I mean in weight terms. Followed then, perhaps, by a kind of detachment, much like that felt by a mist as it hangs over an open field, or by smoke as it floats from a low brush fire. I know you mentioned this. But what then?

Does this go on? Do I slip in and out of sight like a rainbow, or am I sucked out into the universe as particles dispersed? I really think, given the uniqueness of the situation, these are things about which I should be informed.

 

4

Invisible! But not, it turns out, immaterial, I might add.

 I am able to engage with passers by. They look at me as if I am a kind of opaque pane. When I smile they, more often than not, smile back. It is, I think, in the manner of a reflection, as if they have seen themselves in the air and prefer their smiling face to any of their others: the serious set jaw, the dark frown, the grey hung complexion, who needs it I guess! No, in not seeing me they, somehow, seem to see a better version of themselves. Nice, but . . .

Similarly, when I point, as I’ve taken to doing, to one side of the station, and then the other, they invariably follow my finger to something and look off toward it. They look off across over the heads of others. Sometimes they even run into each other as they stare in the direction I am pointing and, consequently, bump into their fellow travellers.  Frankly, the station seems unusually busy. I guess it is, after all, the early evening. There’s a steady circle of cabs at the door and, over by the ticket office, quite a gathering of curious backpackers. I wonder, looking at them, if any have ever been invisible. I wonder if, standing on the banks of the Nile, or with their packs propped against the swept stone base of Big Ben, or maybe sliding beneath the peaks of Mt Fuji in a silver bullet, or standing on the first iron rim of Eiffel, or  . . . Any of those! I wonder if they have ever slipped away and left there just the enormity of their packs and their searing curious gazes. 

 

5

Have you, therefore, any answers?

To be candid, I suspect that the condition of invisibility is somewhat more involved than you first imagined. I’d be the last one to accuse you of inattention to detail, and recognise entirely that my condition is the result of decades of careful, controlled, grant-gleaning experiment, but have you ever considered that somewhere in the melee of bright scientific endeavour something may have been missed? Take for example my sense of the present.

My sense of the present is such, now, that while I am vaguely aware of it I am not, in fact, fully in it. This means many things. For example, as I am not present in the present, as it were (and do excuse any suggestive puns here, I feel it lightens the burden a tad, if that’s okay?), then I am unable to attach myself to the immediacy of activity. I seem, since I shifted, to walk through the moment as if it is no more than a passing of time and all that it is, a steady stream of instance, whirls around me, constant and consistent, while I invisibly drift in and out of it. I am absent in the present. Gone from the there. Removed from the included. Out of the in.

This might seem merely a matter of changing perspective; but consider this, sir, if I am not here where am I?

 

6

This station, incidentally, doesn’t help. You see, people are going places. They are in conditions of movement. This movement, though largely spatially linear, is based on a sense of time. That time is now. There is much nowness here, professor. Much! But what is that to me? I am not here, I am not present. My absence hangs about me like the smell of stale clothing or the aroma of some weedy herbal remedy stuck up my nostrils. I am without now, without me, without, without . . .

I cannot, in this, relate to anyone. Those two, with their dark suits and their leathery laptop computers: two principles of the firm, Montgomery and Murch or Porchester and Peters perhaps. What do they do? Is today the day they will construct the tower, destabilize the yen, pave the entire downtown, sell off that franchise for seedless potatoes, advise on advice until they build their bank into a monster and it plumps its great shadow. Who knows? They as unconnected to me as the arm of that crane or the dull brass of that railing or the sweep, sweep, sweep of that guy’s straw broom. And those kids? Yes, by the fountain. Where, pray tell, are they going, huh? School, of course. Those little uniformed mites. To learn what? Algebra? The history of the Romans, the Normans, the Franco-Prussian Carpathians? What I wouldn’t give at this moment to share with them some fact of life! Maybe I could tell them about chemistry, or the glories, you might suggest, of biomechanics. I wonder if they would take to a story about the manipulation of DNA? That is a real gem. The little cusps of yourself that are held in a hair or found in the inner scrapings of your lower lip. About what can be done with these. About the configurations and calculations that spin out from mighty driven nodes to the tiny prick of a needle. How little time it all takes. How uneventful it all seems, much like a regular trip to the canned goods aisle to buy a tin of beans. No more than that, and hardly fully explained. What if I told them that little story then? And with embellishing?

 Ah, fear not, good professor, I signed your document, I’ll keep our bargain, my lips are sealed!

But neither the business folk nor the sorely educated bother me as much as those two. Those by the stairs, clasped to a rail, his arm over hers, her hand in his, his head on hers, her arm through his, their eyes, where? On each other!  On each other, sir. But how can that ever be again for me? And just look . . . Look! She is like a piece of light just held there in suspension. And he, holding it, seems to have found all past and future in one lit tiny corner of the World. She is framed and he is framing. He is held and she is holding the thread just tight enough so he can chose to stretch back and snip it out of her reach. But he doesn’t, see; he hovers right there in her light and he is made of it.

What? What, huh? You have taken all chance of that from me!

 

7

Sorry.

Sorry, I know, I signed. The money was paid. I have no recourse. Whatever reasons I find now to step back into time and see there your bearded mug, all trimmed with letters and personal assistants, your crisp outline of the project – with very fine electronic assistance, I might add, the company must be proud. But you didn’t tell me it would happen here at this station!

Frankly, I imagined I’d wake one morning in my bed, alone, and not be there. The joy of that, I dare add. I imagined in that invisible, half-awake state I would stand invisibly naked at my bedroom mirror and laugh at the possibilities. I saw myself stealing a nice little Ferrari or one of those soft top jobs, one sunny day in July, and driving out past some gawping assistant, as I cuddled the entire takings from the afternoon furlong at Worthington Park, and slipped soon after onto the Princess of the Pacific for a free cruise of all the islands of the Polynesians, while not one sight of me was there. Not a whiff of my presence. Nothing known or realised. That was my vision! How wrong I was.

 

8

But forget it. Hey! Suffice it to say, I’m going home. I’ve booked a ticket. If anyone calls, tell them you haven’t seen me. Ha! Man, I’d love to see you as stoic in this position. But ignore that. Tell them I have gone. Tell them  . . . whatever! Perhaps tell them this:

We experimented, once, with invisibility; but, unfortunately, the technique was flawed, the subjects remained. They filled up spaces like a memory fills up an empty room or the sight of a love floods your eyes. They were never completely absent. There was a “continuing effect”. Do me a favour, huh: use this term. A continuing effect, so that where they once were remained occupied by them, so that as the crowds in a station moved toward the steeling crank of a train, they too boarded the carriage. As the clasp of a hand let go, they felt it too. As much. Perhaps more. As the slipping away of one momentary held life from another went before them, they were there too, feeling it. Yes, they were there. Just as I say. Tell. Tell the others that.

 

Brooke Biaz (c)