Once Upon a Time
“But still, for a cat to disappear and for an elephant to disappear — those are two different stories.”
“Yeah, really. There’s no comparison. Think of the size difference.”
The elephant vanished, and the cat died.
It didn’t matter, then, when I had told him goodbye. And now that we were under — with my notes too — he had no intentions at all. He had my attention, but he was simply occupied by the big boys and his big toys. How big they were. He was with the people. The elephant in the room.
After that event — consumerism and the blub for them all, the boys too — men in court wanted answers from the few books selected for Yvi from the Library of Babel.
A short story for you.
“We are not speaking about religion. This is science and fiction — not the one in the Bible.”
I cleared my Class.
They were a bit older, far older and mature, unlike me. They wanted to dig me from the underground.
“You all don’t wanna talk about it, do you? All men fell, spoke to each other as strangers, and formed a little family away from the codes you had desperately tried to write for yourselves?”
He was picking another argument. Nothing similar to the new neighbours of the Highrise.
“In the clouds, the only valuable gold is data. We mine every day, in and at night. And once I met a stranger — in one of my little rooms — in the underground Midnight arltry.”
I too started on a new note.
“Well, if you need any information — not on me, though — you could ask the bots, and they will give you for free all of the 666 variations of you. All notes from the underground. But…”
“I hold the right to them all.”
I cut him short and warned him. The scientist mentioned that.
“I was much, just as you are now — human, god or demon. Man is a good thought. I’m no special, not any less or more than you. I’m with the XY X-chromosomes, similar to you. Any other like my classmates, but much older because I repeated a class in fear of sitting for the national exams.”
He was now reading my thoughts. Notes from the underground.
A note from the clouds had read that Wanyama — my classmate — had found a few, if not all, in the world’s wild web. A Telegram. And thought it was cool to invite me to the Highrise.
Some wanted stories. Others just satisfied that I was a member of the surviving WhatsApp group — which they so loved to add me.
“I’m bored, so why not!” I had thought about it.
They were happy just to know that I was there. Like the Omelas, who did not walk away. They usually met up in town, probably on Fridays. Tom promised to give me a call the next day, which took weeks — only to go through when I was very much sleepy, dreaming about my big elephant that had disappeared.
But for Jack — a member of the clouds — he had some mysterious intentions. He was nothing much apart from a librarian that gave me books. Not in exchange for a pass to the underground, but for the Library of Babel. He had chosen for me carefully selected stories meant to be read by me only once I was in the underground.
I did not like the notes. They were stories to be read by men in the bar — not limited to drunk lawyers who could turn black to white.
I decided to read the Russian notes later. Notes from the underground.
For there were pressing issues at hand.
The elephant in the room. The cat that died. And why you went underground.
The first one — The Elephant Vanishes — a Japanese book by Haruki Murakami. Red in colour. With an upside-down elephant falling from…
Not really.
It was just a tiny elephant when it vanished from Tsavo. A Highrise in Ongata Rongai. Where all he cooked was pasta — Italian spaghetti — talking to a stranger online about coming to an understanding. At the same time, he left my cat to die.
He was here in the underground speaking about the elephant that had vanished. And his answers to the cat that died were vile:
“Those are two different stories.”
He was insisting.
In the underground, time was free, or cheap. Everyone had some on their watch. So I let him introduce himself — trying to unmask one Atoto Atori, “who went by the name Ivy. And we all sang when they grew. But some were poison.”
He did not pretend to read anymore. From the blank notes he had brought from the underground — one he used to write and keep watch, high from the clouds, to the underground. He pretended to read the particular font that the eye could read.
And even if he was killed, no one in our little underground kingdom could read his notes.
“Everyone had their code in the underground. And he was right — anyone could do anything: a free world. Except, well, for Yvi.
You could mine for some, and they never ran out. From the ground she had grown up — and the sky people were far her favourite — from the ground where they traded for an Yvi.
A penny for anyone’s thoughts.”
“Once upon a time” — simple words on a figure drawing. A woman. A cat. An elephant. Leaves. Palms together.
That was all.
And now I grow.