his face and said: “You did this to me you bastard, you did this to me.”
He had never seen her before but he confessed that, in some irrational way, he felt responsible and didn’t defend himself. Fortunately she disappeared before she could do him much damage.
7.
1. The world is merely a dream dreamt by god who is waking after a long sleep. When he is properly awake the world will disappear completely. When the world disappears we will disappear with it and be happy.
2. The world has become sensitive to light. In the same way that prolonged use of say penicillin can suddenly result in a dangerous allergy, prolonged exposure of the world to the sun has made it sensitive to light.
The advocates of this theory could be seen bustling through the city crowds in their long, hooded black robes.
3. The fact that the world is disappearing has been caused by the sloppy work of the Cartographers and census-takers. Those who filled out their census forms incorrectly would lose those items they had neglected to describe. People overlooked in the census by impatient officials would also disappear. A strong pressure group demanded that a new census be taken quickly before matters got worse.
8.
The world, according to my father, was exactly like the human body and had its own defence mechanisms with which it defended itself against anything that either threatened it or was unnecessary to it. The I.C.I. building and the I.C.I. company had obviously constituted some threat to the world or had simply been irrelevant. That’s why it had disappeared and not because some damn fool god was waking up and rubbing his eyes.
“I don’t believe in god,” my father said. “Humanity is god. Humanity is the only god I know. If humanity doesn’t need something it will disappear. People who are not loved will disappear. Everything that is not loved will disappear from the face of the earth. We only exist through the love of others and that’s what it’s all about.”
9.
“Look at those fools,” my father said, “they wouldn’t know if they were up themselves.”
10.
The world at this time was full of unpleasant and disturbing scenes. One that I recall vividly took place in the middle of the city on a hot, sultry Tuesday afternoon. It was about one-thirty and I was waiting for Karen by the post office when a man of forty or so ran past me. He was dematerializing rapidly. Everybody seemed to be deliberately looking the other way, which seemed to me to make him de-materialize faster. I stared at him hard, hoping that I could do something to keep him there until help arrived. I tried to love him, because I believed in my father’s theory. I thought, I must love that man. But his face irritated me. It is not so easy to love a stranger and I’m ashamed to say that he had the small mouth and close-together eyes that I have always disliked in a person. I tried to love him but I’m afraid I failed.
While I watched he tried to hail taxi after taxi. But the taxi drivers were only too well aware of what was happening and had no wish to spend their time driving a passenger who, at any moment, might cease to exist. They looked the other way or put up their NOT FOR HIRE signs.
Finally he managed to waylay a taxi at some traffic lights. By this time he was so insubstantial that I could see right through him. He was beginning to shout. A terrible thin noise, but penetrating none the less. He tried to open the cab door, but the driver had already locked it. I could hear the man’s voice, high and piercing: “I want to go home.” He repeated it over and over again. “I want to go home to my wife.”
The taxi drove off when the lights changed. There was a lull in the traffic. People had fled the corner and left it deserted and it was I alone who saw the man finally disappear.
I felt sick.
Karen arrived five minutes later and found me pale and shaken. “Are you all right?” she said.
“Do you love me?” I said.
11.
My father had an irritating way of explaining things to me I already understood, refusing to stop no matter how much I said “I know” or “You told me before”.
Thus he expounded on the significance of the nether regions, adopting the tone of a lecturer speaking to a class of particularly backward children.
“As you know,” he said, “the nether regions were amongst the first to disappear and this in itself is significant. These regions, I’m sure you know, are seldom visited by men and only then by people like me whose sole job is to make sure that they’re still there. We had no use for these areas, these deserts, swamps, and coastlines which is why, of course, they disappeared. They were merely possessions of ours and if they had any use at all it was as symbols for our poets, writers and film-makers. They were used as symbols of alienation, lovelessness, loneliness, uselessness and so on. Do you get what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said, “I get what you mean.”
“But do you?” My father insisted. “But do you really, I wonder.” He examined me seriously, musing on the possibilities of my understanding him. “How old are you?”
“Twenty,” I said.
“I knew, of course,” he said. “Do you understand the significance of the nether regions?”
I sighed, a little too loudly and my father narrowed his eyes. Quickly I said: “They are like everything else. They’re like the cities. The cities are deserts where people are alone and lonely. They don’t love one another.”
“Don’t love one another,” intoned my father, also sighing. “We no longer love one another. When we realize that we need one another we will stop disappearing. This is a lesson to us. A hard lesson, but, I hope, an effective one.”
My father continued to speak, but I watched him without listening. After a few minutes he stopped abruptly: “Are you listening to me?” he said. I was surprised to detect real concern in his voice. He looked at me questioningly. “I’ve always looked after you,” he said, “ever since you were little.”
12.
I don’t know when it was that I noticed that my father had become depressed. It probably happened quite gradually without either my mother or me noticing it.
Even when I did become aware of it I attributed it to a woman. My father had a number of lovers and his moods usually reflected the success or failure of these relationships.
But I know now that he had heard already of Hurst and Jamov, the first two Cartographers to disappear. The news was suppressed for several weeks and then, somehow or other, leaked to the press. Certainly the Cartographers had enemies amongst the civil servants who regarded them as over-proud and overpaid, and it was probably from one of these civil servants that the press heard the news.
When the news finally broke I understood my father’s depression and felt sorry for him.
I didn’t know how to help him. I wanted, badly, to make him happy. I had never ever been able to give him anything or do anything for him that he couldn’t do better himself. Now I wanted to help him, to show him I understood.
I found him sitting in front of the television one night when I returned from my office and I sat quietly beside him. He seemed more kindly now and he placed his hand on my knee and patted it.
I sat there for a while, overcome with the new warmth of this relationship and then, unable to contain my emotion any more, I blurted out: “You could change your job.”
My father stiffened and sat bolt upright. The pressure of his hand on my knee increased until I yelped with pain, and still he held on, hurting me terribly.
“You are a fool,” he said, “you wouldn’t know if you were up yourself.”
Through the pain in my leg, I felt the intensity of my father’s fear.
13.
My father woke me at 3 a.m. to tell me why the world needed Cartographers. He smelled of whisky and
