Short fiction

The Wipe

The wipe was getting worse. He could feel it in the air. That usual tingling, tearing sensation which lingered at the periphery of feeling was more noticeable, and seemed to be encroaching upon his own senses. It wasn’t just around him but in his hand, his mouth. And there was something new. A moisture, of sorts.

But he’d received the order to ascend. Soon the wipe – hell, even the war itself – would be below him. Hopefully far below.

As he climbed the hill, he nudged up his Brodie helmet to check the sky. There was only a sprinkle of triangles up above; the main offensive was back at the Somme. Still, every now and again a small isosceles would whip past him and disappear into the mud with a light Tthhp.

When he was close to the summit of the hill he paused, re-adjusted his rifle strap and took a moment to look back. The farmland he’d passed through lay motionless below the horizon, which bubbled with fire and light. Above the distant smoke he could make out a giant scalene hurtling downwards, its angles twirling. An artillery round hit it head on and shattered it into a billion tiny shards.

And further above, above the fighting and above streaks of cloud, a finger had finally made contact. It gently nudged the pale flesh as it moved past the spine. Perhaps it would be an encouragement to the troops, if only they could find meaning in it.

To him, it meant progress.

The hilltop had been fortified, long ago. He moved past an 18-pounder which had been neatly severed in two by an equilateral. Corpses were strewn nearby – johns just like himself, deformed into parodies of the human form by decomposition.

Sometimes he wondered whether the war would ever be over, let alone before Jenny came home. But he couldn’t give himself up to doubt.

He didn’t notice the door, at first. Considering its significance, he thought it would have been more embellished, more obvious. But it was just a neat slit in the air, barely big enough for a john to fit through. He could see something on the other side. Tiny black marks, hanging in whiteness…

“John!”

The voice had come from behind – he spun and readied his rifle. No john apart from himself was supposed to be out this far. Was it a deserter?

“Put the damn rifle down, John. I’m no fucking triangle.”

It was a corpse. Or rather, he had thought it was a corpse. He saw now – it was a john, by far the oldest he’d ever seen. The john was crumpled against an artillery cannon, absences and holes pocketing his form. One arm had completely dissolved, and as his mouth moved, teeth and tongue bore through.

“You’re ready to ascend, huh? You don’t look ready.”

“I’m ready,” he said, rifle still firmly clenched. “I’m ready to know what it all means”.

The old john let out a broken chuckle. “You’ll never know what it means. You think that’s what lies through that door? Meaning? Think-a-fucking-gain. The wipe, the triangles, the fingers and the spine on up high – they’re delusions. Rationalisations of things which shouldn’t be rationalised. Form and structure asserting themselves to fill the void.”

“You’re talking bullshit,” he sneered. “You can’t tell me this war means nothing. We’ll beat those triangle fucks before Jenny comes home – you’ll see.”

“And who is Jenny, exactly? How can you be sure Jenny exists? Think about it – what does Jenny actually mean?”

He hesitated before replying. No john knew who or what Jenny was, only that Jenny was not a john, and that Jenny was coming home soon. He didn’t question that. How could you?

He shook away his doubt. “We’ve climbed so high. The wastes are barely a memory, here. You can’t tell me it’s all for nothing. You can’t tell me it all means fucking nothing.”

“And how do you know we’re climbing higher? How do you know this is ascension? We’re falling, boy – and it all started in the wastes, where every john finds his form.” The john coughed unhealthily, sending tiny fragments of his face into the air. “That’s our first mistake, climbing out from the mud and walking ‘till we’ve got feet.”

The rifle trembled in his hands. He could feel the wipe, a tingling which was now distinctly damp.

“If there’s anything pure,” the old john continued, “it was before the wastes. Before we bore the trauma of memory or meaning.”

“And how the fuck would you know?”

“Because I’ve been around a damn sight longer than you have.”

It was at that moment that he noticed the strangeness of the old john’s appearance. Under layers of dirt and grime was a uniform he’d never seen before; he didn’t even look like a Tommy. There was no trenchoat, no Brodie helmet, no boots… and his fully-formed arm wore a large, dirtied yellow glove.

“Who the fuck,” he said, lowering the rifle, “are you?”

“I’m a john, just like you,” the older john said through a shredded smile. “I was due to ascend – through that door – a long time ago. Before the wipe. Before the fucking war.”

The words struck through him. Since he’d ascended from the wastes – even when the world was forming around him and he’d first known of triangles and Brodie helmets and the sky and the ground – there was war, and there was the wipe.

“What was there,” he said, “Before… this?”

The old john smirked, looked at his gloved arm, and lifted it with great effort. “There was the washing”.

“And why did you stay? Why not ascend, if you were ready?”

“I wasn’t ready,” the john said, staring at the gaping door, “not really. I looked through it for a long time. A long time. Nothing seems to change, at first. It’s just some vision that makes no sense. But it does change, slowly. It moves.”

“Like the sky?”

“Not quite. The images in the sky move slowly, but they’re … disconnected. What you see through the door, it’s one vision. Like you’re looking through someone else’s eyes. And it’s not right. It’s not right at all.”

They were silent for a while. The door and the strange symbols beyond seemed to hold them.

“You’re going to do it, aren’t you?” said the old john.

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Well I can hardly stop you. Just don’t forget. Don’t forget all of this.”

He moved towards the door. It hung just above the ground, a vertical slice in the order of things. This close he could see that the marks were formed in horizontal lines, over a slightly curved surface – walls of some sort? He tried to tell whether the image was shifting somewhat, but couldn’t quite tell.

“Well if you’re going to do it, just fucking do it,” the old john yelled after him.

So he did.

A sensation of falling.

Everything was tearing. Not apart, but together. On an atomic level, particles collided painfully. Skin cells, stretched beyond physical capability, were drawn to unison by a billion penetrating pinheads. Twisted flesh unravelled around bone; fused, tingled, burned. Kineticism, friction and perpetual agony united all things.

The hand and the mouth were the centre of it all. Timeless, they collided. Their conflict radiated heat and pain, which gave definition to the known.

The hand is wiping the mouth. It has been, forever, and it will continue doing so, forever. It may be true that a consciousness - if such a thing can be said to exist in its own right - may in some time or space experience the beginning of this act; and if this is true, there must also be a consciousness which witnesses the end of this act. Perhaps, in some distant corner of existence, if anything truly exists at all, there is a consciousness which has no knowledge of the wipe at all. But the hand is wiping the mouth. Forever.

John wiped a small amount of drool from his mouth.

The book on his lap had become meaningless. He’d been staring at the same few sentences for a while now, and simply wasn’t taking it in. The words were empty signifiers; hieroglyphics scratched on the wall of some dead tomb. He shut the book and set it to one side, deciding to postpone his First World War history reading for a time when his mind was slightly more cooperative.

Groping for the iPod dock on the bedside table, he managed to cut off the music just as it had finished wailing about plaa--aycing fingers through the notches in your spine. His legs had become entangled in a mountain of duvet, and with a few successive kicks he managed to deposit the crumpled mass on the floor, freeing his lower half from its sprawling angular pattern. Finally, and with great reluctance, he heaved himself to his feet and made his way towards the kitchen.

Just as he was about to leave his bedroom, John paused, re-adjusted his uncomfortably reclined boxer shorts and took a moment to look out his window. Above the horizon a cumulus cloud, magnificent and beautiful and pure, drifted with such a slow decisiveness that John was inclined to believe that it knew exactly where it was going.

He reached the sink and carefully slipped the soapy Marigolds over his eczema, as he still had a particularly encrusted cooking dish to attend to. His housemates had been nagging him to do his washing up all morning, after all - and Jenny was coming home soon.

In some places, the wipe had ended.

James Wragg