Out There by Quentin S. Crisp

Author:Quentin S. Crisp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mount Abraxas
Published: 2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

:V:

They ran. Eventually they tired. Miserable in the knowledge they were lost, yet also elated at the strangeness from which they had fled, but from which also it seemed they might not safely return to the world, they found a barely adequate patch of earth to set up camp, putting up only one tent, into which they both crawled. When they felt secure, they built a small fire a little way in front of the tent and, feeling no need to sleep, they talked.

Jake was suffering from a manifold bewilderment, but he remembered the monk telling him he was going back to the strangest thing of all, and he remembered that the monk had told him he must remember, and, shuddering and shaking, he told Sean what had happened, not wanting to imagine what Sean might think of it, but simply needing to recover as much of it as possible.

Sean listened respectfully. Perhaps he, too, had received impressions this night that made him inclined to listen.

“Maybe that was the kind of map the noodle-seller meant,” said Sean thoughtfully when Jake had reached the part of his account relating to the Map Room. “And this showed the way to Mars, you said?”

“Yes,” said Jake, despondently. “Not just one way, about twenty-seven different ways, but none of them by landing a spaceship there. Sideways—that was the word he used. You have to get there sideways.”

“Do you remember them, these twenty-seven different ways?”

“No. I only remember one.”

“Maybe one is enough.”

“Maybe it is. It was the last way, though, the way to take if all the others failed. For some reason it was like it stuck in my head and forced all the others out. I can’t forget it, even if I wanted to, but the others, I try and try but can’t remember them.”

“What is the last way?”

Jake sighed. “It’s simple really. It’s even… I’m not sure how to put it. Seductive? Anyway, I’ll tell you: It’s foolproof in a way, but there are problems with it. All I need to do—and I’m not sure it would work for anyone else—is go out into space in the conventional human way and die screaming in the void between planets.”

∗ ∗ ∗

Dawn came. They were not far from human settlement, but for some time they felt lost, as if there were only this wilderness without future—only this and death.

Within days they were back in Tôkyô.

The two of them were not sure how to reconcile their experiences with the reality to which they had returned. Had there been only one of them on the mountainside, it might have been easier, since then an absolute distinction could have been made between private experience and the world of consensus. Then again, it also helped that they had shared some, if not all, of the strangeness. When they were alone together, they spoke about it, ever more tentatively, always drawing in more tightly the circle of implications. But the circle could never quite close. They always agreed on one

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