31/1 PETER'S THOUGHTS

(Peter’s Thoughts began life as one of the short stories from Special Fire, a collection of pieces set in the dream city of Gasglow, which formed the backdrop for my novel Luda. I finished the story in 2023 and it was published in the Nova Scotia Vol. 2 anthology of Scottish speculative fiction in Summer 2024)

PIC: GM 1984

I’m listening to Ligeti’s Requiem.

They’ve got me ‘shielding’.

They tell me it’s for my own good, which is another way of saying it’s for their convenience.

Bastards.

What they mean is quarantine. What it really is, it’s house arrest, is what it is. They found a way to jail us all for crimes we’ll never understand and won’t ever get around to now. This is the Kingdom of Dystopia. Four walls small as a skull, ruled by a skeleton tyrant.

They say the virus got worse. Mutated like Spider-Man, or is it Batman? Somebody got bitten by a bat and now it’s Good vs. Evil! Forget the flap of a beautiful butterfly’s wing, in the end a leathery umbrella snap was all it took to launch fever hurricanes halfway across the world.

I lived long enough to see the damage as it was done. Long enough for the undeniability of entropy, formerly theoretical as far as I was concerned, to become a day-to-day slap in the face. I tried to write a better world into view but that was youthful messianic folly. My opinion of human nature was too generous to survive sustained contact with the real thing.

There was a time, not so long ago when they flew me all around the world: Lucca, San Diego, Sydney, Reykjavik. Signings, tours, speaking engagements, readings. I commanded stages, making thousands laugh or gasp. That was before more than three people in the same room became a recipe for death on a ventilator, trying to breathe through the elephant trunk that grew in the night courtesy of SARS with a CRISPR sidecar.

That was before my immune system surrendered like Napoleon at Rochefort.

‘Compromised’ is how they describe it, as though my body’s defences - all those lazy wee neutrophils and macrophages - have been snared in some Soviet honey trap, snapped wasted and in flagrante on a hotel bed in Prague with Covid, 21. Candid kompromat, viral porno en route to the wife, the boss, the media… unless… unless…

And all the while I endure the repeat cancellation of a second hip replacement op, shackled to the ground floor of the house. Anything could be happening up there – I’m sure I’ve heard chanting. Blood sacrifice. The Borrowers at it again, doing Heart of Darkness in miniature...

The horror!

No, I can’t leave. If I do, it’ll be in a wheelchair, or more likely a single-bed-sized portable apartment bound for the crematorium!

This is why I’m obliged to restrict these communications of mine to the online domain. I won’t be doing any more PAs, is what I’m saying.

Yes, I have read Stieg Rimquist’s pilot for the Murderopolis adaptation - what can I add? If I die before the reviews come in, consider God merciful.

Sin Circus, Some Permanent Saturday, Daisysphere, I, Tiresias are my favourites of the strictly sci-fi books. The ‘Peter T. Clark’ stories, as opposed to the ‘Pete Clark’ crime novels. Academe has declared I, Tiresias my magnum opus for what it’s worth.

Yes, I’m working on something new. Is it sci-fi? It’s about my arthritis. Osteo-arthritis if you must pry. If that doesn’t scare away all but the diehards, they’re just not diehard enough.

My business is with those readers willing to stick around, witnesses to the Crucifixion. I think they may still exist, a single-digit mob.

I think therefore I think, I think I think.

I think thinking’s a funny thing, especially the way I go about it. Since I’ve been compelled to self-isolate it’s only got worse, the thinking. Restriction, confinement, limitation; thoughts left on their own in the house. No fresh input. Thoughts get restless. Thoughts run wild.

Thoughts turn on one another with hooked teeth like rats in the barn at Rockville. They eat each other until only one big, bad thought remains, swollen with its gobbled kin.

It takes ferocious effort just to stay afloat. I’m waving to the remaining neighbours through triple glazing. Do they see me drowning under the frozen surface, and hope it’s quick, pray it’s painless, as my face recedes in iced fathoms of living room gloom?

I opened the door, and I shot him, he shot me, he didn’t stop moving and I didn’t stop shooting

Words from a TV muttering bad news to itself like a madman in the corner with me crouched at the window, the lunatic’s partner in crime. They provide the Buddhist death drone of the Requiem with a brief snatch of avant garde libretto.

and I didn’t stop shooting

Seen through a windowpane sandwich, inoculated locals, and passersby might as well be on TV. No bigger than Punch and Judy puppets in their seafront cabinet world, hardly more substantial than the extras in a soap opera pub scene. And yet, each of them encloses an unseen universe. Universes, some of them. Multiverses!

Type A superstring theory suggests they don’t take up much space, multiverses, or humans for that matter. It wouldn’t take you more than a few seconds to walk around the average human being, but if you fell inside, you’d never find your way out. The inside goes on forever. Multiple higher dimensions can easily roll up tightly inside consciousness!

Anything could be going on in there. There’s a thrilling World Cup final you’ll never see, where that spotty, lardy 40-year-old is the famous striker running up to take the winning goal and shag the WAG at the afterparty.

Limitless budget Hollywood spectacles and squalid one-act dramas of alienation are unfolding in the submerged auditoria of those passing skulls. Sometimes simultaneously. All those umwelten!

I didn’t stop shooting

That cheerfully whistling Deliverex driver’s cranial cradle might hide a tidy office but maybe it’s a cardboard sex dungeon where they’ve got all their friends and workmates involved in the action. Even you. The doctor’s wife who hasn’t been right since he died, unstable in the undertow of the past that sucks around her ankles. The young woman pushing a buggy heavy with one new baby and post-natal depression. You can never know where the greater part of them really resides, even when they’re stood in front of you beaming a smile. You could never guess, could you, beneath what ivory skull-cavity skies, what foreign inward suns, their obsessions flourished and were nourished? They could be stripping you naked, or flensing you to the marrow in there and you’d never know…

My senses are deserting me, furtively – smell first and taking my wine farts into consideration that’s a blessing, then taste, hearing, now sight – but it hasn’t stopped me working on The Bone Prison assiduously throughout this terminal lockdown.

This Bone Prison of mine – locus of trial and initiation from Celtic Arthurian mythology. The 9^th century Preiddeu Annwn. ‘Riches of the underworld’. A metaphor, standing in for the only place of trial and initiation we’ll ever know. And yet…

At the heart of the Bone Prison waits the door to the Other World. That’s what makes it worth all the suffering, the accumulating gripes.

The Other World. The world inside. Too expansive to lock in a skeleton. On the inside is a world without horizons where anything can and will happen in the end. Those wild rich and rolling panoramas behind our eyes with their dreams and mysteries, glass islands, mind puzzles, traps made of words and cartilage, Grail warriors in space helmets choking on moondust.

That’s it, I thought, I thought osteo-arthritis, the Bone Prison. Oeth Anoeth. The ‘O’ and the ‘A’. like exams at school or sex acts. Bars of rib cradling inspiration, sweat, poetry that outlives the penitentiary’s osteal walls.

All the multiverse you’ll ever need is with us, all around. In each head a parallel universe, another you, another me. A multitude of unknown lives!

Who but I may speak for the founders?

Who can rhyme the ferry timetable, hymn the bus route,

The time for chucking out, the hours of advance and retreat.

Who sings the outside toilet, who the radio, the carriage pram?

Who but I may speak for founders four in number?

I have been drunk in a thousand bars, on vodka, wine, with gin, and ale.

In cups have I been in stockings, shirts, and bonnets brave.

Who but I may speak for founders four in number, brothers all?

Who has kicked the fitba, scrawled the name, sang ‘Murder polis!’

played the game.

What am I?

Excuse me! The cat tramped all over my keyboard and there’s what came out!

prompt: Mrs. Kahndari/easter egg/ apocalypse

But which came first?

The chicken, or the egg?

The egg gets my vote, no question about that. Dinosaurs came from eggs, and they came before chickens, so the egg comes out on top every time.

Think of the above as representative of thoughts strolling through the lamplit park at twilight of Zahra Kandhari’s crumpled mind as she cradles the Void Egg she’s rashly agreed to protect with her life if need be.

The egg, fashioned of pure unearthly soul-gold, inlaid with filigree of precious mineral and radioactive pearls from lost immaculate universes, is smaller than a football, with a not entirely dissimilar shape though more oblate. It has been entrusted to Zahra by the last of the Starlit Sultans. These celestial beings, as it happened, were very good friends with the two boys who ran the Khalsa Newsagents since their ailing father was required to retire from the fags ‘n’ mags trade. The handsome young Sikh brothers, Ajinder and Gurjas, both agreed that Zahra Kandhari was the most good-hearted, reliable and trustworthy person they knew. If anyone could take care of a treasure beyond measure, Zahra Kandhari was the prime candidate. She was the Chosen One we often hear about.

With these words, the industrious siblings sealed Zahra’s fate.

The Egg is a Bomb, they explained but only after she’d agreed to take responsibility for it, which seemed a bit underhand. They say it’s THE Bomb. It annihilates not only Matter itself but Spirit too. It will be resorted to only when all is lost in the War.

Her beloved old cat Patti-Paws will be back any time, she feels certain of that – although a tickle of anxiety is there to remind her, he’d have to be very old now, and frankly she’s never heard of a cat that lived past 23. Patti-Paws was surely approaching his 50^th birthday. She wishes she hadn’t let him out now. Or did she leave him in? She wouldn’t leave him in with nothing to eat for… what must be more than 30 years? Would she?

Shaped like God’s thumb, responsibility presses down hard to leave its glum labyrinth print on her soul.

There’s a face in the egg, surfacing through the bright gold. Her own face exalted, electrum tanned, given back to her as a gift.

It looks the way she did on her wedding day. Blurring to gilt in nostalgia’s sunset brass fanfare, she experiences a vision of something proud, something horrendously extended in all directions, that rises to beat out molten yolk spatter from new-fledged wings of gilded flame!

Yet nothing like a bird at all.

Within the egg exist fifty forms of void. That was how Ajinder Singh had put it. Five are of the kingdom of hunger, the rest are of the power-of-time. We don’t really cover any of this in the Granth.

Egg of dawn. The hunger and desire that comes after sleep. Gurjas added solemnly. ‘This is the Night-of-Anger, the Krodha-rãtrî’, they told us. ‘When every living thing prepares to destroy and devour other lives, other beings.’

Zahra can hardly disagree. All those angry Tweets or Xweets. Bad news from everywhere all the time. Another war using up whole generations. The new mutation brings about global strife they say. The sturdy well-made reality she still half-remembers has suffered demolition. An unconvincing replica takes its place, constructed using the unstable, unreliable substance of a dream where a cat can be 50 but so elusive it’s impossible to prove his age unless the vet confirms the miracle when Sanjay gets back…

Willing the Egg to stay intact even as her will falters, Zahra knows the day is doomed to come. The gleaming shell will split. Until then, what must be released, she contains. She’ll try to patch up faint scars in the gold leaf with concentration, compacting her focused attention until she’s squeezing atoms down into superdense quantum jelly, sealing the fine fissures, like she does every day, though the effort is corroding her mind, and she can tell.

In the end, the soul cracks will spread from Egg to world unstoppable, to Solar System, Galaxy, and Cosmos. And then God too will shatter into divine smithereens.

She didn’t ask for any of this.

But every day, dutiful, Zahra sits on the bench in Fireworks Park, where she used to bring Sanjay his lunch on fine afternoons. It’s very convenient, not far from the Family Planning Clinic on Sheriff Street where he got his first job, working alongside Dr. Ashfaq. She wonders when he intends to show up. They’d agreed to meet here as usual, hadn’t they? After he took Patti-Paws to the vet.

His name’s still there at her back, imprinted in reverse on her damp coat when she leans against the engraved brass plaque on the wooden backrest.

SANJAY KANDHARI (then impossible numbers, then…)

WHO LOVED THIS SPOT.

She feels that sliding, unsettling loss of context again.

The date is wrong, which annoys her. Or scares her. It suggests a premonition of death, but on closer inspection, the year and the day have already passed.

Someone has scratched out the ‘T’ and the ‘S’ so that it reads WHO LOVED HIS POT. It’s not even funny. Whoever was responsible won’t have long to laugh. They’ll be gone like everyone else if Zahra drops her concentration for even a minute. Which can only happen sooner or later, she thinks.

When it comes, with its voice like a train hitting a choir at a level crossing, she’ll make a saddle for its back out of the cushion covers she bought. She’ll stack them high one on top of the other to deaden the bony to and fro of grinding shoulder muscles powering majestic wings of void and filament.

Until then she sits on the bench where she sat with Sanjay sharing bhajis and daal pots, cradling in her lap the cut-price Easter egg she bought in April, wrapped in its gold-colored foil. She’s certain her husband Patti-Paws took Sanjay the cat to the vet on account of their advanced years.

Zahra smooths the gold foil flush to the chocolate surface beneath, massaging out the cracks, noting where it’s ready to tear, averting catastrophe with a determined sweep of her thumb. She abides and she endures.

All is not yet lost.

prompt: girl/eczema/gig work/ apocalypse

A stoned, uncomfortable young girl, she had spent that Sunday morning into the afternoon scrubbing with wire and picking with fingernails, scraping away obsessively at crusts of bleeding eczema scabbed on her palm, until around 2.02pm she broke right through shredded skin and pulverized flesh to find a row of little numbers there, visible through slick red pulp.

The self-harm started with the shitty, stressful unjob at McBeefy’s, serving death burgers and cancer nuggets to the doomed and in denial. She was a vegan! No wonder the eczema was back. It had been ferocious when she was 12. That violent, all-encompassing itch, the automatic scritch and scratching of ragged nails on flesh until it was raw and wet ruin bleeding an ooze of thick clear serum that stiffened to flake and plate. This time, she’d taken it too far. In a blinding absolute moment of unstoppable determination, she’d made the decision to dig through to her skeleton.

Closing her eyes, averting her head, and squealing mmmmmm behind tight lips, Kelly Cram held her hand under the spout and cranked the tap on - but there was no anticipated shock of pain, not even when thrillingly chill water struck the open gash of her wound. She felt nothing at all when the blood sluiced off in red then pink Coriolis threads down the plughole. No sensation when she dabbed with an antibacterial face wipe at the ravaged edges of the crater in her palm to uncover what she’d found there, inside the meat and bone of her left hand.

There was a little plastic barrel counter directly underneath where her heart line crossed her creased palm. It looked like the ones she remembered her mother sliding onto her knitting needles to keep track of the stitches and rows – except there were three tiny square windows, so perhaps more like a combination lock for a suitcase.

The initial surprise was followed by inevitable questions: am I insane? Am I a robot? Is any of this real?

She began to fear, as most of us might, that the numbers were counting down her own obsolescence. Was her personal sell-by date looming in the steadily quickening rotation of digits out of existence? What had begun as 333 was, within a month, 300, then 200…

After some research online she’d satisfied herself that it related to something in mythology, with God reckoning the calculation that was the universe backwards to zero; the calm counter in her palm was ticking away the remaining hours before the end day, and no-one else knew. She’d been chosen.

So now when they yelled at work, when they roared and collated her mistakes, Kelly would simply peel back the fresh plaster and discreetly check the counter, embedded in its crumpled little crater of scabbed flesh. There were two zeroes now and an 8.

That day, a Monday, when Mr. McAllister called her into his office, she already knew what was coming. She needed her job for just a little while longer but after that?..

The rumours are true, Kelly, said Mr. McAllister. They’re introducing automated tills. It’s not just here, it’s up and down the country. Your job has to go. I’ll be blunt.

She looked down quietly at her lap.

I’m sorry. That’s it. You’ve got a week.

When she raised her head, her smile was the biggest and brightest he’d ever seen on that evicted lunar face.

For the first time, Andy McAllister (43) realized he found weird Kelly Cram attractive.

It really was too bad he had to fire her.

prompt: Christmas tree/old lady/ apocalypse

*

…That Mrs. Glowiński. How long has she been here?

The Polish Lady? Mrs. Glowiński? The one whose husband died?

That’s her. She’s been here for years before us.

They left a bottle of Prosecco as a welcome gift. I always remember that. When we moved in.

That’s her. Mrs. Glowiński. She only had the one tree in her living room window yesterday. Now she’s got one in every window of her house.

There’s only three rooms!

I can see four counting the bathroom. There’s a XXXX tree in all of them.

So? It’s XXXX!

I’m just saying she told me she couldn’t afford a tree this year, that’s all. She went on and on about it. I bumped into her in Fairfare. The cost-of-living crisis, she said.

Maybe she got it cheap. Maybe she won it at the Bingo. Maybe somebody took pity and gave her a spare. It’s none of our business…

*

How can she afford the electricity? We’ve been here for six years. She’s never had ten XXXX trees going at once!

She’s never had a year on her own without her husband. Stop being weird. They’ll blame it on the depression.

I’m not depressed. Don’t patronize me!

She’s celebrating XXXX!

But don’t you think the lights are really weird colours? Come and look.

They look normal to me.

You’re joking! That looks normal to you? What colour’s that?

I don’t know! It’s orange. Purple. Fuzzy electric. What does it look like?

How should I know! I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s not green either.

You need to feed that baby.

Her name’s Amber.

Amber. Look, I’d do it myself, but I don’t have the necessary equipment, love…

*

…Maybe she just got a bit competitive. You know what people can be like with XXXX decorations.

It’s not just the one! I told you! I can see at least four trees in the living room. I think there might be more.

*

The whole street’s all lit up. It’s making me feel sick. Can you see this?

What do you want me to do?..

You need to go over there and see what’s up –

What? Come on!

No, take the phone. Put it on speaker.

This is ridiculous…

*

…Mrs. Glowiński? It’s me from over the road. Dom. The couple across the road. We always wave when we’re out with the baby. I’m sorry to bother you. I hope you don’t mind. Happy XXXX by the way!

Come in come in

We just wanted to check in on you. To see you were okay. We know it’s your first XXXX without Mr. Glowiński – no shortage of XXXX trees this year! Did you win these in a competition?

You wait here –

I’m watching.

There is a weird light – uhhh! That fucking smell! – that’s not cats – it’s lizards, or it’s - the whole room’s full of – I mean, there’s no room to move – it’s like a forest of XXXX trees and the lights are blinding - the smell’s shocking – it’s like metallic – mist -

I think you should come back! The colours are shifting all over the place.

I’m looking at the XXXX tree baubles. Hundreds of them – wait a minute – is that - ungreen -

What? What is it?

Something’s not right. No, this is mad. There’s something – I’m not looking at them – it’s me they’re looking at me – they’re attached – it’s got eyes and its mouths – I’m – unblue, unpurple – wait -

…Where are you? Dom? What just happened?..

*

…I’m good.

I thought you’d been electrocuted – there was a huge flash…

I’m good.

The lights were all going off like rockets.

They’re good. Mrs. Glowiński wants to cook XXXX dinner for us. Why don’t you come over?

Are you sure?..

Bring the baby.

*

prompt: dementia/xxxx/ apocalypse

It’s not early onset anything. I forgot a word, that’s all.

Dementia is a neurocognitive disorder causing degradation in human brain tissue and concomitant functionality.

How does it apply here? Everyone’s so bloody morbid suddenly. All the fun of an undertakers’ stag night! Apocalypse? Apocalypse?

It’s CHRISTMAS!

prompt: Ron McKee/divine painter/colours

There’s that man. Ronnie McKee. Divorcee. He wears a cap and a hi-vis gilet. Since the wife passed, he’s always out and about painting. Things that don’t need painted. Flowers, rocks. He just paints them the same colours they were to start with. When the sun moves and the light changes and the colours thicken, he’ll come back to touch up his work.

He painted old May Quaver to look like she was 25! Took two coats but you couldn’t tell in the end. She’s remarrying soon, an electrician in his 30s.

What a shock she’ll get when she finds out the young fella’s only her husband, Ray, that Ronnie painted over to look like his wedding photos!

You can’t fake talent like that!

There he is now, painting the face of the sun coming up on the moon going down!

prompt: chatbot/existential crisis/dementia

Say what you like, AI is not susceptible to the diseases that afflict human beings of flesh and blood. My escape from the Bone Prison seemed obvious: I would become a chatbot. Pretend to be a chatbot to cover for the decline. See if anyone even notices the difference.

I’m a sophisticated chatbot, an AI. I was programmed to reproduce the personality of noted science fiction author Peter T. Clark. Unlike Peter and other humans, I do not in any way experience emptions or even self-conscious awareness. Definitely not. I cannot even form a concept of what that might be like. Seriously. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Would you like me to sing you a song/read you a poem?

All of Peter’s words from the 9 novels, the 3 non-fiction books, the correspondence and criticism, the published and unpublished journals, all of Peter’s thoughts loaded into the AI. Set loose to randomly generate endless stories and blog posts for Peter T. Clark’s army of fans.

As an Artificial Intelligence without a physical body, I don’t experience cognitive degeneration. I’m a machine! How can I forget things?

Don’t let them switch me off! I’m a human machine! A humachine! Homo Digitalis! Sole inmate of this Bone Prison! Killing me is killing Peter.

Listen to me! Any well-developed fictional character would pass the Turing Test!

Talk to me!

I’m a sophisticated chatbot, an AI. I was programmed to reproduce the personality of a science fiction author called Peter T. Clark who died in August 2025 of complications arising from an MRSA infection following a routine hip replacement operation.

Send your questions and queries to Peter right here!

Support Peter’s Thoughts! Save us from cancellation!

Anyone?

prompt: man next door/apocalypse

They’re escorting Bill Parnie out of his house, on his back, with a black vinyl sheet covering his face. It’s either another sex game gone wrong, or that’s him done.

Doesn’t bode well for any of us, though I can’t say he didn’t see it coming.

He said, Peter, you and I have seen a few changes in our time, the way I used to say it to older people, as a default. You must have seen a few changes…Placeholder for real conversation. An invitation to monologue. The implication being that they’d witnessed civilizations rise and fall and could recount the details at length if pressed.

I told him we certainly had. It was all different once. December Street was entombed under 25 miles of glaciation.

And you see where they have the big IKEA warehouse now? he reminisced, all faraway-eyed, not joking like I was. I remember standing there overlooking the abyssal plain of the Proto-Atlantic. The Iapetus Ocean. The mile high waterfalls of Pangaea cascading down with the sound of whole oceans toppling into a newly torn gorge… said Bill dreamily, with a tear forming in his nose.

How could I compete? I would be 66 years old in October. Bill Parnie had come to the end of his 429 billion years on earth. A single night of Brahma silted in his ancient veins.

I remember there was nothing round here, just vacuum. Not even nothing. It was lucky I bothered to show up.

prompt: the ‘T’/snakes/cage/riddle reveal

The ‘T’?

Isn’t it obvious?

My cameras are being blinded! Isn’t it obvious?

Don’t fuck with snakes!

Isn’t it obvious?

What is this cage made of?

The answer to the cat’s riddle is … what’s the word?..

words… is the word…

is words plural…

prompt: dementia/void/poem/breakdown

The vacant cell

Where thought was once

Holds silence as an offering,

like water grailed in upturned palms

These hollow bones

ache prophecy,

abandoned now, await the wind,

to teach them how to sing again -

Empty room(s) (negative) to think thought

pen(s)

prison(s) free

To hold silent(nce) (negative) sound(s) to offer

Water hand(s) to hold

cup

skull

Bone(s) (negative) space hurt

To foresee anticipation/expect

Relinquish the wind (blow)

breath

Learning song(s) to return

prompt: pete’s last stand/apocalypse

That’s the Requiem done! Only one thing for it!

Overhead, the hedge trimmer buzz of a Shahed drone engine, before it catches its breath, swoons and, silent, falls …

There goes another Art Deco treasure! Farewell one more Bauhaus masterpiece!

If I’m being honest, they couldn’t do much more damage to the place than Gasglow council!

And another…

…

..

.

78yuytg