52 The Man Who Saw Tomorrow
Episode written & produced by Ross Sutherland
Voices: Ross Sutherland
Transcribed by Sathya Honey Victoria
Imaginary Advice, Episode 52
The Man Who Saw Tomorrow
Uh, hey! Just before the episode begins, um, I just wanna mention on October 1st 2018, I am doing a special Imaginary Advice live show in Chicago as part of The Fest run by Third Coast. The show is at Links Hall. The special guest, which I’m really excited about, is A.J. McClenon. You can get tickets at thefestchicago.org. Info is also on the Imaginary Advice Podcast facebook group. If you know someone in Chicago and you think they might like the show, please send them my way.
OK…right!
[background music stops]
[clears throat] Let’s begin, then.
[calm piano music begins]
Imaginary Advice is four years old today! Did you know that? Happy-happy birthday, Imaginary Advice.
Hang on, let me just…[music stops - silly birthday music plays] Yeah.
[piano music resumes]
So, now that the podcast has reached four years, I can say that Imaginary Advice is now officially the longest-running audio project that I’ve been involved with. Now, I’ve never spoken about this before but there were in fact, three other radio programmes that I had a hand in before Imaginary Advice.
Programme Number One was a weekly drum and bass show that I co-hosted on LiveWire FM in the city of Norwich. Hold tight, Norwich. That was from 1999 to 2002, I think.
Um, Programme Number Two was the Friday Morning Bulletin programme that I used to co-host at Colchester Sixth Form College. I think that’s from ‘97 to ‘99.
But the thing I wanted to talk about today is Programme Number Three because it was Programme Number Three that first gave me my love of making audio.
Now, I say-I-I love making Imaginary Advice. Like, I love making it so, so much. But Programme Number Three was still probably the best programme I’ve ever worked on. It was. At least emotionally, for me, it was the purest. And I-I have never again experienced the sheer joy of creation that I got to feel when working on that programme. And almost everything that I do on Imaginary Advice is about trying to recapture that feeling.
Now, I was convinced that this show was lost forever. I mean, I suspected there were some recordings somewhere, though I didn’t realise that I actually had one of those recordings myself. There I was, looking through my old cassette mixtape collection a couple of weeks ago and, uh…[laughs in disbelief] I-I found it.
[loading cassette]
I must admit I was a bit nervous to listen to it cos…maybe some things are best left in memory? Maybe it wouldn’t be the amazing a show that I remember.
Child: [singing] Dum, dum, dum, dum! [talking:] One, two, thwee.
Turns out I needn’t worried.
Child: [singing] Hi-anybody in the world! [nonsense scatting]
[piano music resumes]
So, this show, it was recorded at my-my grandma’s house in Edinburgh. I think the year is 1983. This was actually, this was my favourite thing to do at my grandma’s house: sit on the end of her sofa facing my grandma’s hi-fi and record endless rolling radio shows into the small metal microphone attached to the unit.
Child: It’s sunny at the moment. Little bit cloudy.
I was 22 years old—only joking. I was four.
Child: Grandma had a nice house. She has a picture of Ross as a baby
You might find it a little bit hard to believe it’s me, based on the Scottish accent but, you’re just gonna have to take my word for it.
I meant what I said about these shows being the most fun I’ve ever had in front of a mic. I know it’s impossible to get back there. Like, you can’t recapture the sheer freedom of creation that you felt as a kid. But still, I think there’s…there’s something to aspire to in there.
Child Ross: He has his own chair in the house. And he has his own spaceship as well!
These radio shows, they tend to break down into a couple of regular sections. Um, and one of those repeated sections is uh, me singing the song Teenage Kicks by the Undertones.
Child Ross: [sing-yelling:] “Teenage kicks right through the night! Teenage kicks right through the night! Teenage kicks…”
Apart from that pop-punk classic, most of the other music on the show is uh, is just scatting, really.
Child Ross: [scatting:] Doo! Din-din-din-din-ni. Doo! Din-din-din-din-ni…
Yeah, I-I-I do a lot of scatting.
Child Ross: [more scatting:] Yoko, yaka, yoko, yika, yoko, yako, yookoo…
There’s the occasional autobiographical essay. Here I am talking about my relationship with quilts.
Child Ross: I’ve-I’ve two quilts! One in the drawer, and one on the bed. They’re really good, you know.
[laughing] But for the rest of the time, uh, I mostly tell ghost stories. Which just goes to show that my interests haven’t changed that much in the intervening years. Ghosts, teenage angst, and weird atonal music still feature pretty prominently in my oeuvre.
Of all the other shows I’ve made, it’s um, it’s funny that this one is still the closest in tone to Imaginary Advice. I think that’s a good sign. I’m proud of that.
My grandma doesn’t really appear on any of the recordings. Actually, you can briefly hear her at this moment, when I notice that it’s snowing outside:
Child Ross: It’s snow-Grandma! It’s snowing again!
Grandma: [quiet voice in the background]
But even without her voice, my grandmother’s presence is all over these tapes. My Grandma always encouraged me to be creative. Around this same time, she uh, she got me into writing nonsense poetry, which would then later become the primary way that I would communicate with her when my family moved from Scotland to England. I was terrible at writing letters, but nonsense verse, that was like our own private language. And all of my interest in poetry kind of evolves out of that.
Whenever I was staying with my Grandma, she’d just let me record for as long as I wanted. Come to think of it, she’s kind of like an amazing…she’s kind of like a hype man, really, you know? Everybody needs a grandma with them in the studio. You know, just to let them know when their scatting is…fire.
Child Ross: [more scatting:] A-doo-dee! Boom, boom, boom, boom. Puh-toom…
[laughing] And I-I-I appreciated that.
Child Ross: That’s the end, Grandma!
Then, whenever I was done recording, I’d call my Grandma back into the room to help me stop the tape. I didn’t know how to do that.
I think that knowing that she was nearby um, was one of the things that actually gave me the confidence to keep recording. I’m uh, I’m very lucky that I got to have her in my life. And I suppose that’s what the tapes really tell me.
So um, I thought I would play for you now—as a kind of self-indulgent birthday treat to myself—I thought I’d play you one of the improvised stories that I found on the tape.
Child Ross: I’m going to tell you a story.
And I know that some listeners might find it quite hard to understand my uh, my four-year-old Scottish lisp, so um, to help people out, I’m gonna provide a little bit of running translation.
Child Ross: This part is called “The Boy Who Saw It…[pause] The Boy Who Saw Tomorrow.”
Ok, so, the title is “The Boy Who Saw Tomorrow.”
Child Ross: “The Boy Who Saw Tomorrow.”
Yeah, that-that’s what I said: “The Boy Who Saw Tomorrow.” And now the story begins:
Child Ross: He saw it every day!
“He saw it every day.”
Child Ross: He saw everyone.
“He saw everyone.”
Child Ross: And he saw every day.
“And he saw every day.”
Child Ross: So, the boy couldn’t do what he wanted to do.
“So, the boy couldn’t do what he wanted to do.” Which, I presume, means, you know, he couldn’t be a normal little boy, I guess because of the burden of his psychic powers.
Child Ross: The boy heard a sound, and it sounded like this:
“The boy heard a sound, and it sounded like this.” Now, you’re about to hear one of the boy’s visions of the future. And uh, you can tell we’re in a spooky dream because I start doing a kind of sinister scatting in the background.
Child Ross: Boom! Boom boom boom. Red light flashing! Scary People!
“Red light flashing. Scary People.”
Child Ross: Scary Night! Boom boom boom boom.
“Scary Night.”
Child Ross: Boom boom. People trapped in cages!
Jesus Christ. “People are trapped in cages.”
Child Ross: At night-time that happened.
“At night-time that happened.”
Child Ross: Witches [unintelligible]!
I’m saying either “witches are there” or “witches available.” Hang on, listen again:
Child Ross: Witches [unintelligible]! Bum, bum bum bum.
Hm, I still don’t know.
Child Ross: People are out in the dark.
“People are out in the dark.” [child Ross still scary-scatting in the background] So, the prophesy is coming into focus now. We’re leading up to some kind of harbinger of death.
Child Ross: And a man! Boom boom boom.
It’s some big bad lurking in the sands of time.
Child Ross: You see that it was…it was…it was Box Man! Box Man.
Yeah, the boy has seen in his future the coming of his destructor. His name…is Box Man.
Child Ross: He’s a robot, Box Man. And he tries to kill people. He can’t help it.
Box Man is a robot. He tries to kill people. But um, but I do try to elicit some sympathy for this killer robot. Apparently “he just can’t help it.”
Child Ross: The boy saw it too.
The boy saw it too, i.e. he saw all this in his premonition.
Child Ross: He saw this in slow motion. So, you could see it good enough.
He saw these horrific scenes in slow-motion so you could really see it good enough. All the blood-splatter and the scary people and the red lights flashing and all the available witches. He experienced it all in rich, high-def slow-motion.
Child Ross: Psshchew “Box Man!” he said.
“Box Man,” said the boy, awaking from his dream.
Child Ross: The boy, he’s run away.
Scared for his life, the boy ran away.
Child Ross: He went out to the woods.
He went out to the woods.
Child Ross: But he was lost because he found a bear. “Have you got any bread for me?”
The story takes a little bit of a…left turn now. Uh, the boy, he gets lost in the woods, and then he meets a bear, and the bear wants to know if the boy has any spare bread.
Child Ross: Oh! “We’ll have to kill the bear.” So…we killed the bear! Because he had an axe with him.
In an act of senseless violence, the boy murders the bear with an axe.
Child Ross: And he chopped down trees and he found the railway station.
After dispatching the bear, the boy continues on. Soon he has to chop down trees to continue until, hidden in the undergrowth, he finds a railway station.
Child Ross: He went on a train, away from the bear.
The boy boards a train in order to escape the bear. So, either the bear wasn’t dead…or the boy just wanted to get away from the bear’s corpse because of guilt? I like both interpretations, so I’m just gonna let that ambiguity stand.
Child Ross: But there was a bear on the train!
Ahh, but there was a bear on the train.
Child Ross: Lots of bears.
Lots of bears.
Child Ross: So, we all got off because it was a teddy bear train.
He got off the train again. Turns out it was a special teddy bear train. You know, a teddy bear train. You don’t need me to explain that to you.
However, um, bit of deeper analysis though: referring to the animals now as teddy bears is a sort of significant change in tone, which suggests that um, the boy might now be feeling different about the fact he killed one with an axe.
Child Ross: So, we got off and went back into the woods again and back to our house.
The boy walks back through the woods and back to his house…
Child Ross: And that’s the end. Boom, boom boom boom boom! Bye-bye! Grandma! Grandma!
[tape stops]
OK, so…So that’s it. End of story.
Boy has a premonition about being killed by a robot, runs off to the forest, kills a bear, ends up on a train full of bears, and then runs away back to his house again.
It’s not the most conventional of story shapes. It feels frankensteined together from a couple of different story archetypes, and as a result, yeah, there’s a lot of loose ends that the story forgets to tie up like, did the boy forget that the whole reason that he ran away was to escape Box Man? Is he now, by going home, is he resigned to facing Box Man? Is this a story about determinism? Like, who were the people in cages that the boy saw in his vision? What’s the deal with that secret teddy bear railroad? I mean, the whole story is loose ends really.
But I kinda love it for that. I quite like the energy that that gives it. Despite its strange shape, I-I still think it’s still pretty relatable. You know, you run away from something only to run straight into a totally different problem, and running away from that takes you right back to where you started. It feels like an ending because you’re home again, but you haven’t actually solved anything. In fact, you’ve actively made everything worse.
Cos now, you’ve got a killer robot coming over tomorrow and you have to live with the guilt of senselessly killing a hungry teddy bear with an axe. All he wanted was some bread! What’s the-why did you do that, Boy Who Saw Tomorrow? Why? Where were your powers of foresight when you were murdering fantastical talking woodland creatures?
D’you know what? I’m gonna say it: you’re no better than Box Man. That’s the truth. At least Box Man is a robot…he’s following a programme! Yes, he kills. But, you know, he just can’t help it!
[eerie music]
Can you say the same, really? I mean, did you have a choice, Boy Who Saw Tomorrow? Or is the future itself a programme, a programme that we’re all doomed to follow?
[whispering intently:] Is it even possible to run away from that programme? Or is the very act of running away the act of running the programme? [quietly:] Also, what’s the deal with that secret teddy bear railroad? What’s going on there?
[normal volume:] See, there’s a lot of questions…That’s what a good story should do, you know? So, I thought-I thought today on the podcast, I’m going to try to tell this story again. I just-I feel like I was maybe onto something back in 1983, and I just want to take another stab at it.
It’s not plagiarism—I wrote it myself. So, uh…And you know, you learn through copying, right? So, I’m going to copy it, gonna try and learn something from it. Call it a soft reboot. And hopefully I can reclaim a little bit of the energy that I had for storytelling when I was four years old. [deep breath]
[contemplative music starts]
So, um, if the tape is rolling, let’s begin.
[child and adult Ross together:] “I want to tell you a story.”
Quick trigger warning. Uh, this story, like the original, contains terminal illness, murder, psychosis, and violence. Uh, it’s called [shadowing child Ross’ enunciation:] “The Man Who Saw…
The Man Who Saw…Tomorrow”
[IMAGINARY ADVICE]
________________________________________
[music ends - crow cawing]
Brian Dickey Smith was climbing over a turnstile one day when his mind broke open like a cornflower.
[music like a psychedelic flower bursting open]
One second, he was taking a shortcut through the field behind his house, the next, all of time was screaming its way into him.
Making angels in the soft October mud, Brian Dickey Smith felt the field around him ripple through history, the entire timeline jammed into the back of his brain like a knitting needle.
[music becomes mysterious]
He saw Cistercian monks repairing the abbey in the field one over. He saw Vikings flashing their dicks at each other by campfire. He saw a time, long before the invention of England, when there was so much oxygen in the air that spiders were eight-foot tall and cute. He saw himself five years ago, dragging a Christmas tree along this very same path. He saw a carpark full of identical bottle-green automobiles. He saw fire dancing on the water. He saw his father, talking to a man repairing a carnival float. The float said “1978.” His father looked young and was still smoking. He saw many years from now some people building a prison in the field where the abbey once stood. He saw wisteria growing up the walls of the prison.
Echo of Child Ross: People trapped in cages!
He saw thousands of men walking in through the gates of the prison, all of them terrified. And then he saw the same men walking right out again, still terrified, except now they were bald and old. He saw a time when all this was forest. He saw boys play a football match with a cardboard box in the rain. Brian saw himself, wearing exactly the same outfit, pointing to the spot where he was lying in the mud, saying, “That’s where it happened. Right there.” The scene vanished and now the field was dark and lonely.
Brian saw the silhouette of a man. Then the man blew his own head off with a shotgun.
Child Ross: At night-time that happened.
Brian saw several picnics, a few attempts at sex. Not to mention the many, many days when the field was empty, dandelions wah-wahing under a strobing sun.
Until, eventually, an ambulance arrived. A paramedic with cheesy breath administered a sedative to the right arm of Brian Dickey Smith. And the visions faded away, back into the thick black porridge of sleep.
[music fades - beeping hospital machines]
When Brian Dickey Smith woke up in the hospital he no longer felt as if he was falling through time. Whatever door had opened in his mind, the doctors had gone in and locked it again. Once more, Brian felt irrevocably normal, and this made him sad.
[mournful music]
Brian’s life had been one of peaks and troughs, and Brian was willing to accept this as part of the inevitable pattern of life. Sometimes you just had to wait for the bad times to pass. Some waits were longer than others.
The last major peak for Brian Dickey Smith had been the period 1993 to 1996. A period that directly correlated to the lifespan of the TV gameshow Space Pirates, on which Brian had been a recurring character.
On Space Pirates, members of the public were tasked with competing in novelty games of strength and skill on a set designed to look like a huge dystopian spacecraft. Brian played one of the Space Pirates. He’d been a bodybuilder in his twenties. The casting director had approached him at a muscle show. “How’d ya like to be a Space Pirate?” he said.
On Space Pirates, Brian wore Lycra pants and something that looked a bit like an S&M harness. His character’s name was The Vog. He was hairy and ruthless. Audiences seemed to like him.
Brian was usually saved for the final game of the programme, called Airlock, during which Brian would try to manhandle remaining contestants through a series of doors and then blow them into space. Those that were able to avoid being blasted through the airlock won a thousand pounds’ cash prize.
When the show was cancelled, a group of the Space Pirates pooled their money together and opened a space-themed gym in Croydon. Brian probably would have gone in if the Space Pirates had asked him to join, but they didn’t.
And anyway, that was a long time ago now. One of those Space Pirates was dead. (Heart attack.) Another had become a UKIP counsellor down on the South Coast. The gym had been bought by Virgin. They painted over the space wallpaper. And that was pretty much the end of the Space Pirate legacy.
Shortly after the show ended Brian had moved back into his dad’s house. His dad needed some help with the plumbing, plus it helped Brian with his panic attacks. They’d been escalating in London, but out in the countryside, it was easier to escape himself. Brian embraced the lull, for a while at least.
Two years ago, he started a fitness YouTube channel called Getting Heavy with The Vog but the TV company sent him a cease and desist. Apparently, they still owned his Space Pirate name so he couldn’t use it. Brian deleted the channel. It was fair to say that spirits had been a bit low since then.
But then, that morning, falling off that turnstile behind his house, the world exploding into light, time turning on its side, and fluxing into the infinite, Brian had felt…chosen, once again. Just like when that casting director with the ponytail came up behind him at the Maldon Musclemen Semifinal, honked his bicep and yelled “How’d ya like to be a Space Pirate?” in his ear.
Sometimes, all you have to do is strike a pose and the whole world comes to you. You have to wait a while sometimes…but eventually, it comes.
That morning God had reached down from his throne at the end of the world and handed Brian some incredible post-human assignment, he was sure of it. Brian had seen…everything. He’d seen everyone. [child Ross repeats: “He saw everyone.”] He’d seen every day. [“He saw every day.”] He’d seen everything.
But now, sitting in his hospital bed he couldn’t recall any of it. Except, if he closed his eyes and emptied all his thoughts, he could just about feel something at the back of his mind. A presence sitting on the edge of a black sofa in a pitch-black room. A tiny part of him that still remembered.
Child Ross: Red light flashing!
A doctor was standing at the end of Brian’s bed, looking at him strangely. “Where do I know you from?” said the doctor.
Brian Dickey Smith finished his glass of water. “I was a Space Pirate,” said Brian. “On the TV. In the 1990s. I was The Vog.”
“What,” said the doctor.
“The Vog,” said Brian.
“What,” said the doctor.
“The Vog,” said Brian.
“I don’t know what that is,” said the doctor.
The doctor came around to the side of the bed. He took a torch out and shone it in Brian’s eyes.
The doctor asked Brian if he had a history of seizures. Brian said no. The doctor asked Brian if he was taking any medication, or had ever taken any performance enhancing drugs, steroids, etc. Brian said no.
[music returns while Brian remembers]
Then Brian explained to the doctor that during his seizure he had witnessed the entire history of mankind flash past him like an express train. All of history compressed down to a microdot, dissolving under his tongue.
[music stops]
The doctor made some notes. “I’m going to schedule an MRI scan,” he said. “Just to make sure everything is alright in the old noggin.”
Brian said OK. The doctor said it would take two weeks before the machine was available. In the meantime, it would be best if Brian stayed at home and tried to rest.
“If you have any more episodes, come back to us immediately,” said the doctor. He had a tie-clip shaped like a wine bottle, Brian noticed. He must really love wine.
________________________________________
The hospital had called Brian’s emergency contact. His name was Damian. Damian came to the hospital as soon as he finished work.
Damian had a long scraggly white beard like a druid but lacked the necessary height to pull off the druid look effectively. Also, Damian was wearing a black polo shirt that said LOGISTICS in white on the pocket. It was a look that seemed to be pulling in multiple directions.
“Can I get a lift home?” said Brian.
“Are you OK?” said Damian.
Brian nodded.
“I stepped out of the time-stream and saw the whole universe,” said Brian.
Brian realised he was smiling like a crazy person. He tried to dial back the intensity a bit. It felt important to come across as a serious person, particularly now.
“I think God left a backdoor into the source-code of creation,” said Brian. “And I think I accidentally fell through it.” Nope, thought Brian. Totally failed the normal test there.
Damian scratched his nose for a very long time.
“Do you want to stop off at a supermarket on the way, or um, do you just want to go straight home?”
Brian considered this. “Straight home,” he said.
________________________________________
Once Brian Dickey Smith was dressed, the two men exited the ward. However, upon leaving the lift, the men were unable to locate the exit to the hospital building. For inexplicable reasons, they discovered they had to go back up in the lift to level two, cross a gangway to another building, and then go back down to the ground floor to reach the exit. However, when they reached the exit, it led directly into an underground carpark, which was definitely not the way that Damian had arrived. He’d definitely parked his car in the front carpark. So, the two retraced their steps a second time and went back in search of a map or a helpdesk.
To their confusion, Brian and Damian ended up right back on the ward where they had begun. Brian’s bed had already been filled by an elegant-looking pensioner wearing burgundy silk pyjamas. This time they exited Brian’s ward on the other side. “We started off on the wrong foot to begin with,” said Damian. “That was where we messed up.”
[music stops - hospital machine sounds]
But now they were standing in a different ward, this one with huge machines between each of the beds. Each patient was riddled with tubes and wires. The whole room hummed with electricity.
Child Ross: People trapped in cages!
From down the corridor they could hear someone screaming “help me, help me!” [child Ross: “Get help!”] but no one moved. The nurses remained focussed on their computer screens.
Beyond that ward was a glass corridor connecting them to a newer building with fashionable grey walls. The sign said Diagnostic Imaging.
Child Ross: Red light flashing!
In a glass office, a nurse was looking at a monitor feed. On the monitor, Brian could see a grainy image of a patient being drawn head-first into a hole in a giant white cube.
Brian realised he was probably looking at an MRI scanner. He’d seen them in films and whatnot. It would be him on that monitor in two weeks’ time, his brain appearing in little black and white slices on the screen adjacent.
Child Ross: You see that it was…it was…
Even through the wall, Brian could hear the sound of the machine. [beeping, tapping noises] Yelping and whirring in its own primitive language.
Child Ross: It was Box Man! Box Man.
Sometimes it even sounded like it was laughing.
[MRI machine tapping]
Or uh, scolding you, maybe.
[MRI machine making angry noises]
Or uh, maybe even threatening you.
[MRI machine making scary sounds]
Child Ross: He’s a robot, Box Man. Pssew!
Brian imagined himself surrounded by that machine, frozen still, terrified. Deafened by that inhuman cackling as the scanner chopped him up into thousands of tiny pieces. Those invisible fingers reaching deep into his brain and lighting up a tumour the size of a Brussels sprout.
[MRI churning in background]
Maybe there was something growing in the old noggin. Maybe he wasn’t the next step in the evolution of the human race, but in fact, a relatively ordinary man with a relatively common terminal illness.
The doctor had said that brain cancer affects one in seventy people. Brian imagined a gathering of seventy people, say, the audience of Espresso Laughs, the local comedy night in town. Brian had been to a couple of shows there. He imagined himself in the audience of Espresso Laughs, one of seventy. Laughing uproariously at whatever was happening onstage.
“It’s not that big a room,” thought Brian. “If one person in this room definitely has a brain tumour, who’s to say it isn’t me. I look just like everyone else but maybe I’m laughing at all the wrong things. Maybe the things I’m laughing at are things that aren’t actually happening at all.”
“Jesus F-[beep] Christ,” thought Brian, “I need a drink.”
[MRI roaring in the background]
The MRI was so loud now, it sounded like it was trying to smash through the wall. Brian Dickey Smith had to admit that he didn’t really know what was going on in his life right now. But he did know one thing for certain: once he was put into that machine there would be no turning back. Once the truth was out there, that would be it.
Child Ross: Box Man…he tries to kill people. He can’t help it.
[MRI getting louder and louder]
Child Ross: Red light flashing!
[MRI sound cuts suddenly]
________________________________________
Before going home Brian got Damian to stop off at the field behind his house. They walked over to the turnstile together. “It’s cold,” said Damian.
Brian looked down at the patch of mud next to the turnstile. You could still make out a rough Brian-shaped outline down there, though the ambulance stretcher tracks had junked it up a bit. [crows making noise in the background]
Brian pointed to the mud. “That’s where it happened. Right there.”
“Ok,” said Damian, beard blowing in the wind. “So, is this location significant somehow?”
“No,” said Brian. “It isn’t. It’s just…I just had to do that, that’s all,” then they walked back to the car.
[quiet piano music - fire crackling gently]
Damian offered to stay over that night so Brian would have the comfort of knowing someone was nearby. Brian made up the bed in his dad’s old room. Before bed they ordered a pizza. To make up for the fact that they weren’t drinking any alcohol they ordered an excessive number of side dishes.
“So,” said Damian. “You think you saw the future.”
“Yep,” said Brian. “And the past. I saw everything. It was like someone was fanning a huge encyclopaedia in front of my eyes. And in that moment, I felt a sense of cosmic peace and understanding, you know? All fear just drained away and a cold, abstract love of all things descended upon me.”
Damian nodded. “So how does the world end?”
“I can’t remember,” said Brian. “It comes back to me in little bits and pieces, really—I haven’t remembered that bit yet. But I did see everything, so, I know it’s in my head somewhere.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with…the show, does it?”
“No,” said Brian. “Why would it—No. Space Pirates isn’t real, Damo, it was a TV show. This has got nothing to do with—”
—“For some of us that show was very real,” said Damian.
“Yeah, but Damo, this was the actual future! Not blokes in tinfoil and glowsticks. Nothing from before matters now, don’t you see? This isn’t a fucking gameshow, this is…real.”
Damo nodded and poked the fire for a bit.
“Alright,” said Damian eventually. “So, what bits do you remember, then?”
Child Ross: People are out in the dark. Pum pum pum.
“Uh, I remember,” said Brian, “I remember some…some people? Some-some figures. And uh, and it’s dark.”
Child Ross: Pum pum pum.
“So, where exactly are these people? And, you know, and-and-and when?”
“I’m not sure.”
Child Ross: He saw this in slow motion. So, you could see it good enough.
“But I can tell you they’re uh, they’re moving really slowly. And um, yeah, yeah, they’re definitely people.”
[sniffs] “S’not great,” said Damian. “You got anything else?”
Child Ross: Psshchew “Box Man!” he said.
Brian nodded. “Yeah.”
Child Ross: The boy, he’s run away.
“Yeah, uh, I don’t go back to the hospital. I run away. Because I’m too scared to get in the MRI machine.”
“OK,” said Damian. “But I mean, you could go back to the hospital.”
“Yeah,” said Brian. “But I don’t. I’ve seen the future and I don’t.”
“But the future isn’t written yet.”
“Yeah, it is,” says Brian. “I’ve seen it.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Damian. “So where do you go, then? If you don’t go back to the hospital, where do you go? I mean, you have to do something, right?”
Brian looked out the window.
Child Ross: He went out to the woods.
Damian’s voice sounded strange, the words shunting around like bumper cars. “You don’t…know…do you?…Brian, you need…help.”
“Don’t worry,” said Brian. “I know exactly where I’m going. I’ve seen it.”
Child Ross: He went out to the woods.
“Where, then?” said Damian.
Child Ross: He went out to the woods.
“I’m going out… to Las Vegas.”
[electronic dance music]
________________________________________
[dance music continues in the background]
One week later, Brian Dickey Smith was sat at a roulette table in the Golden Tooth, downtown Vegas. A waiter had just brought him a ham sandwich and a cocktail called Chloroform Charlie. It was basically a vodka lime with a bit of dry ice in the top.
Of all the casinos Brian had sampled so far, the Golden Tooth was his favourite. It was the noisiest, most garish spot on the block. The walls were alive. They popped with digital projections of spinning gold coins. It was like seeing stars when you took a blow to the head.
There was so much glitz and noise you could barely think. It was the perfect place to leave the past behind and concentrate on the future. Which, as far as Brian Dickey Smith was concerned, was all about getting rich on his new-found talent. Brian already knew the result of every roulette game, every hand of poker. It was all logged in his head somewhere. He just needed to tease it out.
[police siren in the distance]
Every night after his shift on the tables Brian would return to his motel and try to sharpen his psychic abilities. He’d sit on the bed, cutting the deck over and over.
“Two of hearts. [flipping cards] No. Two of clubs [flipping cards] This time: two of hearts. [flipping cards] OK. This time: two of hearts.” [flipping cards]
Brian Dickey Smith knew that it was his destiny to come here. He’d heard the little voice in his head tell him so.
Child Ross: He went out to the woods.
“He went out to Las Vegas…” Although sometimes Brian Dickey Smith did wonder if he’d misheard it. The voice did have quite a thick, strange accent.
[casino noises]
Brian took a sip of his cocktail. Time was just a road, one had simply to walk down it. He let the voice in his head guide him.
It was calling to him from the future…holding up a number. Yes, he could see it now. The number. The number. He made his bet… [roulette ball rolling] and let the ball do its dance.
[black clinks to a stop] “Black 19,” said the croupier.
“Yeah…fuck it,” said Brian.
________________________________________
[contemplative electronic music]
By the following Wednesday, Brian Dickey Smith had…concluded his modest savings. Brian tried multiple ATM machines but they pretty much all said the same thing, pretty much, which was “no.”
With two days’ board left until he was homeless, Brian Dickey Smith started looking for a job, preferably one that was cash in hand and didn’t require a work visa because he didn’t have one of those. A man in the bar at the Tooth told Brian there were cash jobs going for extra security work at the Orbit at the far end of the strip. Brian made a CV in an internet café, then took a refreshing two hour walk over to the Orbit Casino.
When Brian saw the Orbit he felt something in his heart turn inside out. The Orbit was shaped like a giant flying saucer. It felt like reaching the end of a long, tenuous joke. Head of Security at the Orbit was a peppermint gum-chewer named Ben Apeloko. Ben took one look at Brian’s frame and gave him a trial shift that night on the door.
And once again, as easy as that, Brian Dickey Smith was back throwing people off of spaceships. He even had a costume. Not as spikey as his Space Pirate one, but just as tight. Security at the Orbit were called Astro-Guards. They had glowing epaulets, a helmet with an antenna that didn’t do anything, plus a flashing panel on their chest like the Night-Rider car.
Brian took every shift he could get. He was good at it too. Rather than drag drunks onto the street like the other doorman, Brian would pick them up completely, their feet capering in the air as he carried them outside.
Once there was a fight in the smoking area between two guys that both looked like Michael Douglas. Down-on-luck Michael Douglasses. Brian stopped the fight with a single push, sending the more offensive Michael Douglas skidding backwards over a concrete abutment. The crowd had cheered.
There was no time for gambling now. Whenever Brian thought about his first week in Vegas he felt the blood rush to his face. What a fool he’d been to think he was some kind of time messiah. What a lunatic. What a sap with a broken brain. What kind of person doesn’t even know themselves if they are waving or drowning?
He still heard the voice in his head from time to time.
Child Ross: “Have you got any bread for me?”
But now he knew.
Child Ross: “Have you got—”
Now he knew that the voice was ridiculous. It was a glitch, a feedback loop in the brain, caused by pressure and trauma. The voice had to be ignored, not indulged. [echo repeating in background: “bread for me…bread for me…bread for me”]
Alcohol helped, of course. It was easy for Brian to do a few hours in the bar before work, get a solid baseline that he could top up throughout his shift.
[music cuts, voice nearby:] “Hey, you got any bread for me?”
“Sorry, what did you say?” said Brian.
Another Astro-Guard had sidled up next to him. Brian seemed to think that this guy’s name was Jeff. Jeff leaned back into Brian’s ear.
“I said, have you got my bread?…My money? Bread and honey…money? It’s cockney slang, I thought you were English.”
“I am,” said Brian. “I just…I didn’t know what was happening.”
“My money,” said Jeff. “Five hundred. Have you got it?”
Brian had borrowed the money from Jeff to pay back a different loan from a guy called Todd. He’d been meaning to borrow some other money from a guy called Brett that was meant to pay back Jeff, but all the names had just got too confusing.
“Don’t worry,” said Jeff. “Just, after work, meet me out front, yeah? I have a…I have this private hire thing. So, you do this for me, I’ll write off the whole amount. OK? Sound good?”
Around midnight, Jeff was driving Brian north towards a storage park. Jeff had changed into his civvies: a hula shirt and slacks. For some reason, Brian was still in his Astro-Guard uniform.
“Basically, it’s just, it’s just the kid brother of some guy. This kid, he’s a total menace, yeah? He’s always causing trouble. Someone just wants him beaten up to, you know, teach him a lesson. My guy’s already picked him up and locked him in my storage unit, so now, all that we have to do is go in there and scare the hell out of him. See there on the back seat there, there’s a-there’s an axe. Yeah, pick that up. I thought you could be holding that when you first go in, yeah? [laughing:] Cos that’s gonna shit him up for sure.”
Brian nodded.
Child Ross: He had an axe with him.
“You haven’t been drinking, right?”
“No,” said Brian, which was a strange and bold thing to say, considering how much he’d had to drink.
[car engine idling]
When they arrived at the storage unit, Brian could hear the kid calling for help. Jeff put on a Dracula mask.
[muffled:] “It’s to hide my identity,” said Jeff.
“Yeah, but what about my identity?” said Brian.
“You’ll be fine.” said Jeff. “You already look like as if Robocop and a hay bale had a baby. So, the kid’s just gonna be totally bewildered. Like, he’s not gonna remember shit. Are you ready? OK, three…two…” [grunts and pulls up the shutter]
[sinister chord starts building]
The boy was standing at the back of the unit, wearing a koala onesie with electrical tape wrapped around it.
“Oh, yeah, we did that too,” said Jeff. “You know, to uh humiliate him.”
Child Ross: Oh!
Brian stomped into the unit. “Rarr,” he said. Brian hit the boy over the head with the axe-handle.
[heavy thud]
The boy went down in one. [music cuts]
[high-pitched and freaking out:] “What did you do?” said Jeff. “I said beat him up, not knock him out. The axe was meant to be a prop!”
“What are you talking-I used the handle-“
“The handle of an axe! You knocked him cold! Oh my-OK, now-now we’ve got to drive him to the hospital, OK? This is… [exasperated sigh] Get his legs.”
It quickly became clear that the boy had used his koala onesie as a toilet at some point in the evening. The legs were…unpleasant to hold. Brian hauled the shit-covered kid into the back of Jeff’s Volvo and they took off for the hospital.
[melancholy music starts]
A fog descended as they drove, thin and ghostly, like tissue paper. Jeff rolled up to the hospital at a speed that was supposed to feel casual. The men swiftly delivered Koala-boy onto the grass roundabout outside the entrance, and then they drove away again, slightly faster, but still… at what you would consider an inconspicuous speed.
“He’ll be fine, right?” said Brian, “I mean, he’s in-he’s in good hands now.”
Child Ross: So…we killed the bear!
[still muffled:] “Yeah,” said Jeff. “He’ll be fine.”
Jeff was still wearing his Dracula mask. “I’m not-I’m just going to keep it on until uh, you know, until we get somewhere safe,” he said.
“OK,” said Brian, [car door beeping, pavement rushing by] and then Brian opened the car door and rolled away from the vehicle. Brian skidded on his side, eventually colliding with a bus stop.
By the time Brian got back on his feet, Jeff’s car was out of sight. [crowd noise] Brian staggered into a side road joining a flow of young partygoers moving between hotels. Luckily the alcohol in his system was masking the majority of the pain. Brian hoped that Jeff wouldn’t take his dramatic exit personally. He just couldn’t stay in that car a second longer and couldn’t really think of a good excuse to leave.
[melancholy music resumes]
Brian’s head was throbbing. Shadows rushed towards him. It felt like an egg was hatching in his brain. Above him, neon signs so bright you could hear them singing. Everybody seemed to be moving in the opposite direction to Brian. The whole street was trying to push him backwards, trying to blow him out the airlock. He grabbed and pushed.
Child Ross: And he chopped down trees and and he found…
Brian held on to the wall for safety. He moved along it, slowly. Eventually he found a door and then he was sliding down a sharp flight of stairs, and then he was in a bar. [dark, underground music starts playing]
Brian recognised the decor immediately. This was the conference suite of the Orient Hotel. Brian must have walked in though the fire door. He’d drunk here before. They did really good mozzarella sticks. Tonight, however, was clearly a private function.
Every person in the bar was dressed in a giant animal costume. Like sports mascots, but slightly cheaper looking. Giant foxes, giant cats, giant dogs, all walking on their hind legs, drinking tiny cans of craft beer through straws. There was lots of exaggerated head cocking and pointing going on. Brian limped over to the bar and asked the barman if he knew how to make a Chloroform Charlie.
[muffled through mask:] “Hey,” said a wolf next to him. “I’m Lucas.” Brian shook the wolf’s soft purple hand.
“Lucas, the wolf?”
“Ah…my fursona name is Ro-he-o, actually. Um, you don’t look like you’re part of like the fandom community, no offence, but you do look, like, very cool. I love this, uh…glowing epaulet here.”
Brian had forgotten that he was still dressed in his Astro-Guard casino uniform. Some of it had been damaged when he jumped out of Jeff’s car, so it looked a little more dystopian than when he’d put it on this morning.
“I was just wondering if you could uh, you know, like tell me a little bit more about your character? Cos uh, cos I love it,” said Lucas.
“What?” said Brian.
Lucas brought both his hands up to cover his mouth in a cartoonish “oh no” gesture.
“I’m not bothering you, am I?”
“No,” said Brian.
“OK,” said Lucas. “Well, my fursona—that’s ‘furry persona’—my fursona is a wolf. Because basically that speaks to my inner truth as a bit of a loner, but also someone who has a sharp sense of humour. “Ro-he-o,” he’s a bit of a wandering Ronin-type character. He’s there to help people but uh, he doesn’t stick around, and this kinda reflects my own upbringing which was uh, very isolated, I wanna say. I’m from Montana, if you’ve heard of it. It’s the uh, the “Big Sky State.”
“OK,” said Brian.
“OK. So, that’s me. Who are you?”
“Brian.”
“No, your character name.”
“Brian.”
“No, your-your character name.”
“Uh…B-uh…I uh…my name is The Vog.”
“Go on.”
“I’m a Space Pirate.”
“That’s awesome.”
“I, uh…me and the other Space Pirates, we fly around in our spaceship, kidnapping people and forcing them to compete in games of skill and strength. And then when we’re done with them…I try to blow them out an airlock into the deathly grip of space.”
“OK, OK.”
“And, um, new twist: I’m probably gonna go to prison for clubbing a man with an axe-handle.”
“OK,” said Lucas. “Well, look, if this is still at the workshopping stage…Listen, in the furry fandom, like, we try to choose a fursona that emphasises our good qualities.
So, maybe you just want to think about who you want to be and then create a persona that reflects that. Like, I know it’s not easy, but…Listen, like I just look at you and, I mean, you don’t really want to kill people by throwing them into space, do you?”
“Not really,”
[music changes to a chiptune cover of Teenage Kicks]
[gasp!] “Do you want to dance?”
“Sorry?”
“I said, do you want to dance? I really like this song. This is-this song is kinda like my character’s theme tune. Like, I like to imagine it’s like the opening credits to my cartoon. Look, I have to…come with me?”
Brian hobbled after Lucas to the middle of the dance floor. Brian watched as Lucas began as series of rehearsed dance moves. First some Travolta disco finger, then a choo-choo train to the left, then a choo-choo train to the right. He put his hands on his hips, shoogled them forwards, then shoogled them back. Then he did some chicken steps in a little circle, which felt like an odd choice for an anthropomorphic wolf, but there you go.
[music continues]
Lucas looked back in Brian’s direction and did a kind of naughty finger wag which Brian took as his cue to start dancing too, which he did.
Brian could see the advantages of having all your friends be cartoon characters. Body language was certainly a lot easier to read. A circle had now formed around Brian, a menagerie of humanoid animals, flickering in the disco strobe.
Child Ross: So, we all got off because it was a teddy bear train.
There was a yellow fox with a monobrow; a green and white deer, trying to drink a bottle of prosecco; a purple cat and a slightly grubbier red cat; a blue dog in chinos; a body popping triceratops; and Lucas, his purple wolf’s mane whipping side-to-side, right arm extended in the devil sign.
Child Ross: He saw this in slow motion. So, you could see it good enough.
It was at this moment, surrounded by giant dancing anthropomorphised animals that Brian Dickey Smith felt the chains of time fall away. No longer trapped in the past, no longer trapped by the future. Just for a second, he felt the absolute freedom of the moment. He could go anywhere, he could be anything that he wanted to be. In a moment of unexpected joy, Brian Dickey Smith accidentally shouted the word “Grandma.”
Child Ross: Grandma!
“Grandma!” It came completely out of nowhere. But it also felt really good, so he did it again.
Child Ross: Grandma! Grandma!
Grinning ear to ear, the words seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him, a long-forgotten memory dislodged from a boy he once was. It wasn’t a cry for help or a cry of despair. It was just the sound he used to make when he was tired of being alone in his mind. When a story had run its course and the time had come to go do something else instead.
Lucas cocked his head on one side and gave Brian two thumbs up. As a gesture, it didn’t carry a huge amount of information. But it was enough.
Child Ross: That’s the end, Grandma! Did you hear that bit?
________________________________________
[placid music starts playing]
That’s the end of another episode of the podcast. Thanks again for listening to Imaginary Advice.
Hey, if you’d like to support the show, I need the help. This is a one-person-operation. I write, and record, and edit it myself. A new episode takes about two weeks’ full-time work to make. One day, I’d really love to be able to pay myself a wage for doing this. That’s the dream. Slowly I’m getting there with listener donations though patreon.com.
If you go to patreon.com/rossgsutherland you can sign up to give me a small monthly payment to help me keep the lights on. If you’re already a supporter, I’m so impossibly grateful. You guys…you are the Grandmas of my broken heart. May your-may your own magnetic tapes never unspool in the deck.
Don’t worry if you can’t financially help. But writing a little review on iTunes is also another great way to help me out. If you come to the see show in Chicago, please come say hi.
My name is Ross Sutherland. Thanks for listening.
[music continues then echoes out]