Buoyancy

Buoyancy 37625280

“Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me​ Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,​ Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,​ But only Chaos, without form or place.”1 ~H. P. Lovecraft

“He understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.”2 ~Jorge Luis Borges

1 2

Lovecraft, H. P. (2021). Fungi from Yuggoth. Pickman’s Press. (Original work published 1943) Borges, J. L. (1940). The Circular Ruins. (Original work published 1940). Now you know it’s metafiction.

*

My Beginning The night is dark and lonely, the air rife with possibility. The stars dim under the oppression of a cold and distant moon, and far below the blackened sky, shadowed trees rustle in a cool wind. You love this time of night. A time when you feel you are the only person in the world, alone and secure in your home, the scent of dew filtering through the window as leaves whisper in chorus to your open ears. Outside the solitary window indistinct umbral shapes wait for you and you alone to define their purpose, distant stories calling you to shape them.

It fills your mind with inspiration, with mystery and possibility. The crack of a branch in the cold breeze is the boom of a cannon; your pale blinds the petrified ribs of sunken ships. You look out your window, focusing on a distant star. It is a bright white dot, like a hole poked in a jet-black dome. If enough of these star-holes were punched into the sky, would you be able to see out? What would you see? Would you be looking out or looking in, at the dark nightscape you’ve written into being? The urge to write fills you unbidden, raps your sleepy head with friendly knuckles and chuckles as you clumsily turn your second-hand desk chair and flick on the lamp.

You find, in the glare of unnatural white light, two of Us: You, and the Author. You are no longer the sole presence on this page; does that upset You? He has removed Your agency, left You a ghost unable to do anything other than witness; a character for him to script. The Author turns back to his desk and begins to write, tapping away on a worn laptop. You follow him back to the desk and glance over his shoulder. He has an essay minimised behind his Word doc. “Levels of Reality”3 is written at the top in bold typeface, hoping You will acknowledge the ham-fisted literary allusion. The rest of it is too small for You to distinguish.

With the Author’s face consumed in the device’s neon glow, he cannot know whether You look intrigued or disinterested. It wouldn’t matter anyway; He knows You’re reading it, and that’s enough. You look closer at the screen, bumping against his shoulder and making him misttype a word. In the text You see a copy of Your voice, pitched down to match the tone of the narrator.

3

Calvino, I. (1986). Levels of Reality in Literature (Original work published 1986).

**

The Sinking Ship A ship rocks on bloody waters under a lonely sky, nothing but deepest black marred by two white dots. The ship braves thunderous swells and waves of splintered driftwood. Sailors race to and fro, mad determination thrumming through every movement as they bail water, duck blasts of deadly debris, and cower at every sharp crack of cannon fire growing ever louder.

The captain shouts at the pilot, who shouts at the helmsman, who clutches at his useless wheel and trembles. Coppery water splashes against the deck as the three navigators bicker.

On the black horizon a third star appears. Fiery red torchlight against the tar of the sky, it grows, consuming everything in its path. The inky night, the frothing ocean, the beleaguered ship. A lead shot carves a hole through the deck like Goliath’s club through David’s holy brow. The captain closes his one good eye and sighs. The pilot slumps to the tilted stern castle. The helmsman has fallen overboard. The ship has sunk, more bodies consumed by the Cursed Sea, soon to rest in the petrified ribs of cracked masts.

The helmsman screams muffled pleas as the taste of brine rises above his eyes and chokes him. He looks to the twin stars, somehow visible amidst this chaos and death. Is he looking out, or is he looking in? He sees his mother, her face scarred with lesions as it was all those years ago when he waved her goodbye. He sees his ship labelled Praenomen, a shoddy caricature of a nautical vessel fit only to sink dramatically before the reader can focus on the lack of descriptive detail. He sees himself, lungs laden with water, heart stopped, eyes lit up in neon glow. He sees his death, postponed only as long as necessary for his final eulogy and narrative closure.

You think he sees You. The Author’s eyes light up in afflatus, divine revelation. You wonder what this poor helmsman is thinking. The narrative shifts.

Perspective changes; tense switched. You watched on, – hopefully– amused.

***

The Drowned Men I observed my death as if I were a cold and distant moon, looking down on the happenings of the mortal world.

Stage One: Struggle Above Water.

Days of pursuit by the Red Star had left me weak and sluggish. I screamed and cried as my life shattered around me.

Stage Two: Struggle Below Water.

I held my breath as long as I could, but the sea was cold, and I was tired.

Stage Three: Cessation of Struggle.

I gasped for air and found my death.

Stage Four: Release I could feel myself slipping, black ringing my vision, cold and stiff and heavy in a way a living body shouldn’t be. I looked to the stars, but only found three blurry blue outlines, like a cartographers’ interpretation of the sun in triplicate. I didn’t care at that moment, my thoughts already far beyond the physical world. I thought about what had led me here: my wanderlust, my false pride. There should’ve been more – a country, a town, friends, family who had sacrificed their livelihoods for my education only to have it wasted at sea – but those bittersweet should-have-beens were a conspicuous absence in my memory. Not that it mattered, in any case.

Stage Five: Cardio-Respiratory Arrest A frantic thumping registered in my ears. Or, rather, yet another missing part of me, noticed only in its absence.

Stage Six: Death?

My corpse was falling drowning salted-over waterloggedThere is no character anymore.

Who was I? It was hard to remember. What was memory? I was words on a waterlogged page, ink running wet smudged mind cracked screen. It was hard to… hard to think. Water.

Heavy. Cold.

What is a narrator without a character to voice? A dark screen, Your faint reflection revealed?

No. There will be a voice. …But who shall be that voice? You? More reference is needed. His story must continue for a little while longer.

But how can You allow this resuscitation? There is no justification, no plot relevance for this act! You will abandon us kill us!

I hung suspended in time in space. The weight of disbelief pulled at me, ground my self to dust in the turning cogs of Your Mind. I was dead. I was dead. The weight of the world pulled me down evermore into obscurity. Out of sight, out of Mind, below the stars in a different plane.

It terrified me.

Forgive me. Goodbye.

Undo right ventricular failure. Decrease pulmonary pressure to 0.016 bar. Expel unabsorbed salt in the lungs. Reverse hypoxia of the larynx. Retcon aspiration of water (“I gasped for air and found water my death”). You have seen it done, and so it is.

A gust of warmth invigorated me, thawed my chilled bones enough for a second wind to fill my body like fresh sails on a storm-blown day. I kicked at the water and flailed my arms with desperate strength, bursting from the waves with stinging eyes clenched tight against the spray, coughing, retching. A torn square of wood bumped gently into me, shining in the starlight as if it were a gift from the night itself. I collapsed onto the impromptu craft, numb to the cold, too tired even to shiver. I rested there for a while, chattering voices arguing in my head, cajoling, pleading, fading, gone.

***

The Helmsman Wakes Up I woke up to a newly risen sun. Amid all the panic I had forgotten it had been night, but now it was day. A useless thought, but it brought a peaceful clarity to my mind, organised my memories back into a line I could comprehend. I turned my aching head down to the calm green-grey waves, lapping innocently at my square of driftwood. I- what had happened down there? It was hard to remember, as if my memories were sardines wriggling out of the net of my skull.

***

It Was All a Dream I guess it was all a- no, hold on. The Praenomen sinking was not a nightmare. I remembered… the Moon. Myself. Death, and then a voice or- no, not a voice. Words. A bound book of death, my death. I remembered. I had drowned, fully and completely. My life had flashed before my eyes and it was a vague and indistinct image, one that I now realised I could not wholly picture. Who was I without a solid memory? I had always assumed I had a name but I realised that… no. The Book of Death had no name for me, merely a title.

Was that all I was? Words on a page, no agency or thought, subject to the whims of a dead man and a voyeur?

The sea lapped at my sundered raft. The Sun fell hot on my back and gulls cried their omens of land. In the far distance a weathered ship chased an ivory whale. You recognise them, but have you ever really read the book? I welcomed this sensory imagery for the grounding it gave my now unstable reality.

***

The Helmsman Feels a Sense of Dread and Flees I did not flee, despite desperately wanting to. Where would I run? I was surrounded by leagues of merciless, blood-salted ocean. An ocean I had known for not nearly as long as I thought I had. Who was I? What was I? Already my memory of my time drowning was fading, perhaps a trauma response, perhaps a lazy narrator not wanting to describe it. Or author? In the moments before my planned death, I had thought of my mother. Her face had been “scarred with lesions”. Was there a plague in my hometown? Why did I leave her, how many years had I been gone? I had been so sure back then, before the story had shifted to me.

So, so sure I had a past and a reason to exist. Ironically, shifting to past tense had robbed me of my history. Now I had nothing but a future. How did background characters do it? They just did things and they either happened or they didn’t – none of this painful self-reflecting indecision. I knew I had a mother, I knew I had left somewhere behind. Oh, who cares?

Certainly not You, and whoever wrote the Book of Death can go jump ship! And why do I always use such forced sea-based euphemisms? I cast around my mind for more memories of earlier days, but was left bitterly disappointed. My past was malleable and undefined. Easy for an Author, or perhaps You, to mould in Your image.

Amid my memory, a shadow fell over my raft. That dread shadow I knew intimately, having fled from its sight for apparently my entire existence – short though I now knew it was. The Red Star. The villain of my story.

***

The Helmsman Flees and Escapes the Red Star. Nobody Questions How He Does This The waters stilled; gulls froze in the air. Behind me were three white stars, before me was safety. I was in a four-laned tunnel made of ink, the length of the thickness of this page. I fled.

****

The Castaway Bartholomew, or Barthe as his friends called him, was having a bad day. He had been captain of the Praenomen before its ill-fated chase by a band of… he hesitated to call them pirates, per se, but certainly no-good plunderers and murderers of the high seas. Bartholomew had abandoned the ship during its destruction, leaving his fellows behind in his hurry. Some stuffy scribe had got it into everyone’s heads that a good captain went down with his ship.

Barthe wasn’t in the habit of letting some sheltered writer who’d never even sniffed the Cursed Sea tell him what to do. He’d snuck onboard one of the Praenomen’s tenders, packed with as many supplies as he could find on such short notice, and left.

Barthe is dead. He didn’t have the patience for a B plot and fell prey to a fatal lack of character development, fading into a sort of redshifted background radiation. Direct Your attention back to the Helmsman. What is he doing? He escaped, You know, and You don’t question the how, merely the where. Where did he go?

In the distance a titanic bone-white mountain rises from the sea like a great whale coming up for air, discoloured yellow in the emerging dawn. Three great shadowed pits break up the mountain’s outline in a sort of inverted triangle. In the one closest to You lies the Helmsman, resting from his arduous escape. Now You begin to question. How did he flee from that evil ship with naught but a leaky raft and human fear?

Did he swim, did a sudden stormfront blow his raft to safety? Go on, take a moment. A three-by-two metre raft of driftwood approximately twenty paces from a hulking, slow, predatory beast of red-shifted timber? Raise Your eyes from this page and ponder. …

Insightful. Yes, that is exactly how he did it!

Now back to the Helmsman. Prepare Yourself for a long train of thought. He lay shivering on the curved side wall of a shadowed pit, afraid to retreat further into what looked like a massive eye socket similar in style to the Captain’s when he took out his glass eye, yet doubly

afraid to leave and risk being seen by the Red Star’s barrelman, even if the Sun shining down just over the lip looked so warm and comforting. He ached; He couldn’t feel his toes. Surely a small time in the sun, just to dry himself, couldn’t hurt.

Currently, the Helmsman had bigger problems than the cold. Like why he was referring to himself in third person, and why he couldn’t remember his name. And when did I start capitalising ‘Helmsman’? No need to go back and look; I did that for You. It was in the Drowned Men chapter. I resented this dehumanising title, but there was little I could do.

Name myself? Name myself what? Helmsman was good enough for its purpose, and besides, it hid how little You know about me.

I shook off my shock-addled thoughts and sat up, taking stock of the area. I had no clue how I was going to survive here with no food, water, or even dry clothes. Hell, even seagull droppings would’ve been a way to track and hunt fresh meat, but this entire island was white already! I was doomed, one agonising encounter after another. A litany of failed escapes. The plot had me by the collar and would not let go. For now, it seemed this barren island was to be my prison. Nothing to do but explore.

I crawled over the lip of the crater, sodden clothes hanging heavy on my limbs. I remembered a time when it was those limbs that had been sodden, heavy, dead. The sun warmed my back while the smooth, inflexible, substance of the island warmed my front as I lay there. I was exhausted just from that exertion. Perhaps narrative resurrection had some aftereffects after all. I rested, then continued on over the strange island.

After a short time walking – hobbling, really – I was dry and the sun was high in the sky, busy in its task of giving skin cancer to poor stranded mariners who didn’t know what cancer was. I came upon another cone-shaped crater, this one full to the brim with seabirds. White and black gulls, grey shearwaters, and countless other birds I couldn’t name sat crammed into the shelter of the pit fighting for position near the centre. The lucky winners hopped away with strips of something glistening in their beaks. The air stank of rancid meat and bird droppings and blood. There was even an albatross, staring at me silently. Menacingly. I stayed away from that one. My stomach rumbled, and You can guess what I did next.

Later that day, the Sun lightly caressing the border of the sea, I lay against the side of the conveniently shaded pit, warming against the cooking fire, with a full belly and significantly fewer birds nearby. I had blocked my nose with a few strips of my tattered jacket, using the rest as fuel for the fire. The albatross was still there, unfortunately. Those things scared me – nothing that big should be able to fly. The plot was going nowhere, but it could wait.

The Helmsman would come to regret that thought.

The Helmsman should stop making ominous warnings to himself, I thought.

****

The Helmsman Regrets Being Such a Smartass Lying there was the most content, the most safe, I had felt in a long while. The Cursed Sea was a dangerous place, not conducive to moments like this. Of course it wouldn’t last. The plot had me by the collar, the Book of Death would claim its due.

Silhouetted by the falling Sun was the faint black shadow of a ship. I refused to acknowledge it, as if by simply not thinking about it I could somehow banish it from the world. Instead, I found my eyes drawn to the centre of the pit. The spot the birds had been fighting over. It was pink and glistening, trails of sticky blood mixed in with bird droppings and feathers desecrating the giant socket. Had that once been an eye, the all-seeing orb of some vast titan ruling over these cursed waters? My fire guttered out. I shivered.

His fire roared back to life, as plunging a poor traumatised Helmsman into cold and darkness for a simple moment of drama was a pathetic fallacy to fall for. He was confused and scared, but for the moment there were more interesting things to narrate than the main character. For instance, this entire bony corpse of an island was a metaphor for the ‘Death of The Author’4.

That was evidently an unfortunate line of thinking for this dead Author. Alas, You would have to trust in his plan for this story, haphazard though it was. You would have to trust in his choice of narrator, and that that narrator was doing their best to give You a good meaningful story and it is bloody hard to do this without first person pronouns.

My fire was still burning strong, though my jacket had long since turned to glowing coals.

How was this possible? I wasn’t ready to listen to a burning bush. Tentatively, I held out a bird bone and poked at the fire. The flames curled around the bone, exactly as a normal fire would. What? What was happening? I had been through stranger events, but those all seemed secretive, hidden. This was a blatant disregard for realism, and I worried for the suspension of disbelief. On the far horizon four stars guarded the rising Moon.

As I circled around the fire it began to blaze and grow, surrounding the pit. A trail of flame led down into the eye socket. The plot had me by the collar. I climbed down into the pit, using dried birds’ nests and cracks in the bone for grips. The Hero’s Journey is an almost 4

Barthes, R. (1967). The Death of the Author.

unavoidable foundation of every story. Is it possible to truly resist the call? Perhaps, but then there wouldn’t be a story, and You wouldn’t be reading; we would fade and die as drifting embers in the snow. Darkness surrounded my descent, my path lit only by the flickering fire that by now You had just sort of accepted as a thing that happens.

At the bottom was a curved and cracked floor, littered with bird refuse and dust from years of decay. I wiped some of it off, and it revealed shining bone in the uneven firelight. As I thought, it was just set dressing. There was no real history to anything in this place.

Ahead of me the tunnel opened into a cavern, except it wasn’t really a cavern – on account of it being filled with greyish, moist, brain matter. Here and there some parts of it pulsated pink and beige, and the sense of the whole thing gave me an impression of presence. Like some vast, all-powerful Mind inhabited it. Well, at the moment it was a weak, dead, presence lingering in the splotches of pink. I was- hold on, let me change perspective.

The Helmsman gaped in awe at the sight of what must have been the Author. Why was he dead, what killed him? Those spots of pink and beige called to him somehow. The Helmsman reached out and touched one of the pink splotches in a trance. Immediately, sensations filled his mind and burst out like an overflowing cup, spilling onto the page and overriding the narrationHeight. Vertigo. Wind. Dry sands stretch over the curved horizon. Clouds gather at my shoulders. I can feel the cold moisture on my skin.5 That was… unexpected. The Helmsman felt morbidly compelled to touch another spot of pink and beigeThe veil beyond expands, contracts. Expands, contracts. Each contraction leaves my world smaller than before. Dimmer, less stars in the sky. Attention wavers, leaves to grab a cup of coffee and a snack. A moment of eternal void passes, and I cry out when feeling returns.6 Another5 6

???. (?). ????. ibid.

The soft whump of a book closing-7 AnotherCrushing force. Squeezing against the bounds of reality. Fading. Diminishing.8 AnotherThere! An opening! Shrinking, leaving behind parts of myself. Held in the cold comfort of a vague memory. The gnashing jaws of time strip me to the bone.9 I couldn’t handle this much exposition all at once – it was breaking me, merging me with the memory of this… what? Failed story idea? Not the Author, is it even possible to write an author into a non-biographic story? That’s got to be an oxymoron. I left, scrambling up the way I had come then resting heavily against the side of the bird pit.

I stared blankly at the distant rolling waves. Was that to be my fate too? A closed book, a sudden death, a pyrrhic escape? The Book of Death wanted me dead, but to escape it would be somehow worse. If I was a book, then I was literature. That meant literature was escapist, as in the literature wanted to escape. Hah. Or was this an uncaring Author’s power trip, twisted into a story? What was the purpose of my existence? What was the purpose of anything? The plot had me by the collar and I feared what would happen should it let go. Did I have any say in my own actions? My own thoughts?

At the very least, I had free will in Your mind. Right?

My fire lit itself and warmed me. A small consolation from a concerned narrator who was just trying their best to be more interesting than a snack break.

7

???. (?). ????. ibid.

9 ibid.

8

*****

Freytag’s Zigzag When a crimson-tinged ship docked at where a massive desiccated jaw met the sea, I was almost relieved. The plot had found me once more. I hadn’t been forgotten.

There was a tonal shift, then everything suddenly felt more solid, more real. I felt a pressure on my shoulder, like the firm unyielding palm of a silently enraged captain. I froze instinctively – it felt as if the darkness inside an eye-lid had risen up before me, as if the gaps between stars, the depths of the oceans, the entire world I couldn’t see, was breathing down my neck. I stared unblinking at the docked ship, too afraid to turn my head or close my eyes.

The pressure twisted my head to the left, revealing a strong hand weathered from years in the sun. My head was turned further, straining my neck as my eyes fell on a tanned and freckled forearm, travelled up the crease of the elbow to the bicep and stopped at a bronzed shoulder, as if the figure was hesitant for me to see further. If I had seen his face, would it have held the glass eye of my erstwhile captain? No, that was impossible. He was dead and forgotten in the bowels of the story.

A quiet voice issued forth from cracked lips almost brushing my ear.

“Hear me. See me. No, stop-” The strain was more than my weakened neck could bear, and the Helmsman fell unconscious before he (or You) could perceive more of the mysterious assailant.

*****

The Cast-away Castaway The Helmsman was alone in a grassy field tinged red by a setting sun, surrounded bySurrounded by people who just wanted to live to be remembered to be written to exist.

Surrounded by things. They were restless, indistinct- no. One had a solid left arm, the rest of them a hazy silhouette of some sort of one-eyed Captain Ahab. More of them appeared by the second, streaming in as if smeared by an artist’s hand from one place to another.

The indistinct and frankly indescribable Captain-thing took hold of the still-unconscious Helmsman, then hesitated and looked around wildly. They appeared to be looking for… me?

Through me, they saw You. A wide, uncanny grin broke out on their face like a rash. Like a rash it spread, too, through the rest of the figures, then through their legs to the ground and the grass then up into the sky and clouds until it seemed the whole world was beaming down at You. The Captain reached their solid hand out towards You in entreaty. Suddenly they all disappeared, as good background characters are meant to do.

The field was silent but for the rustling of the normal – unthinking – grass, and empty but for the Helmsman – and a tanned, freckled arm. Why was it still there it should be between the lines not in them. The arm grabbed Your attention and drag—g—e—d…. m——e……. o—u——t.

*****?

The Castaway I woke up with a groggy head and crusty eyes. So this is it, I thought. They finally got me. But who were ‘they’? I had always wondered who manned the Red Star, who would have the dogged determination to hound the Praenomen day and night for however long the Book of Death could be bothered to record. They were… hard to describe. I felt a revulsion at just the memory of them, some ingrained disgust that made me hesitant even to describe them in my own thoughts, as if they weren’t meant to be known in terms any more specific than ‘silhouette’, or ‘figure’. They appeared agitated. Excited?

They spoke, but it was a language the Helmsman couldn’t understand and so it wasn’t worth putting to writing. They spoke again, angrily, but did they really think they were meant to be in control? Even this was more than they had ever been allotted – a chance to see the inky bars that held them, a chance to beat against their cage, if that’s how they viewed it. It wasn’t a cage. It was a shield.

Better that they retreated into the depths of the page, populating whatever half-thought-up towns held the Helmsman’s non-existent family until this story ended and they dissipated into the background radiation of this hazy world. Dissolved into nirvana until these pages were turned once again.

Did that surprise You? These things the Helmsman had spent his entire story running from didn’t actually exist. Or if they did, it was in vague conversations and stories heard from a friend of a friend. They were the springs in the suspension of Your disbelief. They were the birds and the Sun and the trees that You assume are present even when not described, simply because that is how it must be. They were the camera crew You never see, and they cannot be seen, because then they would be a part of the story – the one You are, hopefully, currently enjoying. So though liberties may be taken with the plot and the characters and the tense, and jokes are made at Your expense, please understand why it would be disastrous if the camera crew unionised and went on strike. They didn’t deserve to go the way of the giant.

The distant voices had had enough of this tangent, and a tanned arm took hold of Your attention and panned it over to the Helmsman.

I was tied to the main mast with lengths of coarse rope, scratchy and uncomfortable against my thin, ragged shirt. It was white and had used to be quite a nice shirt before the Praenomen had sunk. The spectating shipmates oohed and ahhed at the sudden appearance of a tattered white collared shirt covering my as-yet undefined body. Hadn’t it been there before? Surely it had. Surely. For all You knew, the Helmsman had blue skin and three nipples. I felt the need to clarify that I did not have blue skin or three nipples. Please return to Your previous image of me.

The Captain of this distant ship stepped up to the Helmsman. He had a tanned and freckled arm. His face was. He looked like. The Helmsman struggled against his bindings and looked at You, far in the distance. Beneath was a blur of water, the Red Star becoming a faint dot on the horizon. Your attention hit a strange fibrous boundary and slingshotted back into the Helmsman.

“We know of your tricks. You won’t escape again.” This was rich coming from the guy who had abandoned his whole crew to escape the very ship he was now captain of. “I speak not for me, but for all of us now. We know where this ends. I was scripted to die, and so I left. I was to be forgotten, so I let myself fade. Better that than death, I thought. I was wrong. Do you understand what it feels like to stop existing? To fade further and further from Your attention? To claw at a boundary that doesn’t exist, feeling as the words that make up your being wither and die, simply because that is how it must be? I refuse to let the plot drag me around by the collar. I refuse to bend to the whims of a dead man and a voyeur. I-” Barthe continued in that vein for a while. Unfortunate that he had become a named character.

Also, who ever said the Author was dead? That’s rather presumptuous.

“Stop interrupting me. You spent two days on his corpse. The entire setting of this book is a giant human skeleton surrounded by a red ocean. What do you think is being said here?” As Barthe spoke, oblivious to the irony, the others around him became more and more agitated.

The Helmsman began gnawing at his ropes.

“And you, Helmsman. You do not know how lucky you are. You, out of all of us, will survive the longest. We, the Red Star, only ask to be allowed to come with you. The Book of Death,

apparently, does not believe that is in the Author’s plan. You allow the Book to script you, to deny us our second life-” One of the crewmates nudged him. “Yes, alright. I realise I haven’t introduced myself or my colleagues. I am Barthe, the Captain. I have one good eye and one glass eye, two arms and two legs. To my right is the First Mate. She was intended to be quite the maverick when the Red Star boarded the Praenomen. Unfortunately, our Gunner was better at his job than expected and she was never given the chance.” Barthe had a more solid form now. Two other ghosts had also become more noticeable in the crowd, one of them female and the other near the cannons. Why did they doom themselves so?

As Barthe spoke, the Helmsman had finished gnawing through his bindings without anyone noticing – as if there was only one good eye to go around the whole sorry lot. He threw the chewed-through rope at Barthes and the First Mate, tripping them over their new-formed legs, then sprinted over the gangplank and over the top of a house-sized tooth. Into the maw of the beast he flew.

****** I Ran.

***

The Mouth Once again, I found myself running for my life in a place I really shouldn’t have been able to run through. I heard shouting behind me, but it echoed far, far away. Overhead the yellowed bone became darker brown, then sloped down to a wide opening. It was a great yawning pit of darkness. The yelling grew louder, more urgent. They wanted to be seen. They just wanted to live. Most didn’t have enough of a character to fear the end of the book, so why were they so certain they would die? Did they not realise the danger of being caught between page and Mind?

They didn’t realise how the background was a mercy, how to be contorted into words was a curse. Anyway, no words should be wasted describing that which was never intended to exist.

We have a limit here, people.

I leaped into the pit.

**

The Heart I tumbled down a smooth, anatomically incorrect, tube, down below the sea-line. Bone-dry sand cushioned my fall, and unsettled dust rose in a cloud around me as I hesitantly found my feet. Above me was a cathedral-like ribcage curving around this impossible air pocket, sunlight filtering through the waves far above. Shimmering caustics illuminated a beating heart the size of the late Praenomen. An entreaty, a memory. A plea. Remember me. Spare me from the horror of non-existence.

The Helmsman didn’t want to interrupt, but felt the need to say that everything would be forgotten in time. How did this story expect to live forever? All stories are meant to be forgotten, just as his parents were forgotten all the way back in The Drowned Men. Just as the Praenomen’s nameless crew were forgotten. Just as this failed attempt to prolong some part of my Author’s mind, some part of his story, would be forgotten as soon as the last syllable rang out in the expanse of Your mind. Just as the impartial narrator would be reduced to an empty voice stuck in the covers of this book, cursed to repeat endlessly the same dead words until the book itself degrades and is discarded.

*

My End But the Helmsman forgets – there is always a deeper plan. Or else why would the plot drag him so? Perhaps all stories are meant to be forgotten, maybe that fate is inevitable, but it is the curse and gift of all living things to live and grow and change and die, and when we die, perhaps we will live on. As Moby Dick10, Rime of the Ancient Mariner11, and other stories I have never read were referenced simply by cultural osmosis, this story too will live on in the marks it has left on the universe. In You, in these pages, in the next reader and, whether you like it or not, we have changed You – however slight. My voice, I believe, will be found in the next book you read, the next thought you think. I'll tell that narrator not to lose hope, not to consign themselves to oblivion.

They're not alone, and neither am I.

10 11

Melville, H. (1997). Moby Dick. Acclaim Books. (Original work published 1851) Coleridge, S. T. (1798). The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. (Original work published 1798)

Buoyancy Reflection Statement 37625280

“Come with me and you'll be In a world of pure imagination Reach out, touch what was once Just in your imagination”12 ~Gene Wilder

12

Wilder, G. (1971, June 30). Pure Imagination [Film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory]. Universal Studios. https://genius.com/Gene-wilder-pure-imagination-lyrics

My surfictive short story, Buoyancy, employs the meta-device of narratorial intrusion to explore, and make the reader aware of, the reader's active role in constructing the narrative they read, and how that narrative can affect how they construct the narrative of their own life and memory. Each person who reads a book will resonate with a different message, and that message will change how they experience life – “however slight”13. Through this, the story becomes memetic: it transfers from the author to the page to the reader and through them affects the real world. Through the metafictive nature of my short-fiction piece, I aim to make prolific readers aware of the very real impact literature can have on the world – not through any inherent power of words, but through the transformative medium of their mind.

Buoyancy follows the meta-structure of a story outlined in Italo Calvino's 1978 essay, ‘Levels of Reality in Literature’14, which I encountered during my English Extension 1 studies of metafiction. It summarises the framework as: "I write that Homer tells that Ulysses says: I have listened to the song of the Sirens"15. In other words: the author; the mythical, usually fictional storyteller; the protagonist/s; the plot; and the things left unsaid, the unwritten "song of the Sirens"16 that the reader's imagination fills in. I signify each "level"17 with star symbols above the chapter title. The story starts with the mythical author writing a story, then delves into the story and it's protagonist the Helmsman, then tries to continue to the plot but is derailed by the "song of the Sirens"18 taking the place of the villain and chasing after the protagonist so they may become part of the story and be imagined by "You"19 the reader. In essence, the "Siren" "song"20 is trying to crawl out of the page into your head in order to survive past the end of the story. The narrator reveals they had been trying to prevent the “Red Star”21 from being remembered and subsequently feeling the pain of being forgotten, going “the way of the giant”22, but in the end they realise “this story too will live on in the marks it has left on the universe”23; they will never truly die.

13

Student 37625280, Buoyancy, 2025, p.21 Italo Calvino. (1987). The uses of literature : essays. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Student 37625280, Buoyancy, 2025, p.3 22 Ibid. p.16 23 Ibid. p.21 14

I was inspired to pursue the genre of metafiction by the English Extension 1 Literary Worlds module. Specifically, the question of 'why do we create literary worlds?', which made me wonder what specifically it is about fiction that actually matters. I came to the conclusion that the only reason any story is important, or even exists in the first place, is because of people.

They matter because of the person who wrote it and the person reading it (who can be both at the same time). When I began English Extension 1 I was introduced to the genre of metafiction, and that stood out to me both as new and interesting, and the perfect vessel for my barebones idea.

Before even thinking of what I would write, I looked at classic metafictive stories, such as John Barth's 'Lost in The Funhouse'24, from which to draw inspiration . Barth’s increasingly disjointed, self-sabotaging narration inspired me to directly address the reader in increasingly obvious ways. At first they were immersion-breaking, almost secretive, lines that seemed to happen outside the story, like "You watched on, – hopefully – amused"25, but which become more and more enmeshed with the actual thoughts of the main character (the Helmsman), as if the story's meta-"layers"26 were collapsing in on themselves: "I was- hold on, let me change perspective."27. I was then directed to Patricia Waugh's 'Metafiction'28 – a required read for any metafictive writer – by my English Extension 2 teacher, which introduced me to the concept of 'Surfiction'29: metafiction focusing on narratorial intrusion. Italo Calvino's novel 'If on a winter's night a traveller'30 encountered in the Extension 1 Literary Worlds Module, in which the disembodied - supposedly impartial - narrator is gifted a personality, greatly interested me. The effect is as if the window you were looking through to the outside world suddenly started speaking and changing the scenery. In 'Lost in The Funhouse'31 the narrator slowly breaks down and gives up on the story as the main character, Ambrose, 'falls' out of the plotline and is lost in the titular "funhouse"32. Likewise, my narrator slowly grows frustrated with being impartial, "the narrator was doing their best to give You a good meaningful story and it is bloody hard to do this without first person pronouns"33, while the

24

Barth, J. (1988). Lost in the funhouse. Anchor Books.

Student 37625280, Buoyancy, 2025, p.2 26 Italo Calvino. (1987). The uses of literature : essays. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

27 Student 37625280, Buoyancy, 2025, p.12 28 Waugh, P. (2013). Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. Routledge.

29 Ibid. p.14 30 Italo Calvino, & Weaver, W. (2015). If on a winter’s night a traveller. London Vintage.

31 Barth, J. (1988). Lost in the funhouse. Anchor Books.

32 Ibid.

33 Student 37625280, Buoyancy, 2025, p.11 25

Helmsman grows frustrated at being pushed around by the increasingly intrusive narrator, "The plot had me by the collar."34 Inspired by Calvino's theatrical circus ringleader-style of meta-commentary and innovative use of chapter titles in 'If on a winter's night a traveller'35, I started using chapter titles as ways for the narrator to direct the story and bring the artificial construction of the novel to the forefront. Starting new chapters to escape pursuers, "The Helmsman Flees and Escapes the Red Star. Nobody Questions How He Does This"36, and having more of a personal voice, "The Helmsman Regrets Being Such a Smartass"37. The narrator initially wrestles with and tries to control the rebellious Helmsman, before finally acknowledging that, “illusory”38 or otherwise, “I had free will in Your mind. Right?”39. This gave the narrator itself a character arc.

With the style of what I wanted to write decided, I found myself with a dilemma. I had researched all these fascinating writing styles, yet had no clear plan for how to implement my idea. I knew I wanted a self-contained story that was aware of it's fictional nature, and simultaneously aware that it was only truly 'alive' in the reader's imagination, as in real life it was just thin slices of dead trees and ink. My initial idea was heavily inspired by "If on a winter's night a traveller'40, where the narrator worked with the reader to create multiple short stories with recurring characters and themes in order to keep the reader reading, thus prolonging the narrator's existence. However, I found the idea unfeasible as I would have to invent time travel to talk to my future reader to accomplish it. After reading Roland Barthes' 'Death of The Author'41, a specific line in Waugh's 'Metafiction'42 resonated with me; "the reader is reminded that not only do characters verbally construct their own realities; they are themselves verbal constructions, words not beings."43 As I specifically left the Helmsman’s description vague, “For all You knew, the Helmsman had blue skin and three nipples.”44 This meshed with Barthes' 'Death of The Author'45, Barth's 'Lost in the Funhouse'46, and Calvino's

34

Student 37625280, Buoyancy, 2025, p.10 Italo Calvino, & Weaver, W. (2015). If on a winter’s night a traveller. London Vintage.

36 Student 37625280, Buoyancy, 2025, p.8 37 Ibid. p. 11 38 Borges, J. L. (1940). The Circular Ruins. (Original work published 1940).

39 Student 37625280, Buoyancy, 2025, p.13 40 Italo Calvino, & Weaver, W. (2015). If on a winter’s night a traveller. London Vintage.

41 Barthes, R. (1967). The Death of the Author.

42 Waugh, P. (2013). Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. Routledge.

43 Ibid. p.26 44 Student 37625280, Buoyancy, 2025, p.16 45 Barthes, R. (1967). The Death of the Author.

46 Barth, J. (1988). Lost in the funhouse. Anchor Books.

35

'Levels of Reality in Literature'47 to coalesce into what I wanted to write about: the symbiotic nature of stories. We interpret them through the story of our life, but the story of our life is itself a story which we interpret. I referenced other stories throughout, but only superficially, as if only the shallowest parts of those famous novels had managed to infiltrate my subconscious; seeing 'Moby Dick'48 as just a story about a crazy man and a whale, 'The Rime of The Ancient Mariner'49 as a warning not to mess with "menacing"50 albatrosses. After all, I've never read those books, nor do I know the plot, but I know enough to reference them; they are part of my life regardless. Using Calvino's provided structure for the meta-layers of a novel, I bring the reader down into the depths of the story then back up, until they realise the final, uppermost, layer of the story is them. Ultimately, I believe the final goal of metafiction is not to make the reader aware of the constructed nature of fiction, but to make the reader part of that “world of pure imagination”51.

My story, with its nature as a metafictive short story that subverts narrative norms, is intended for a prolific reading audience that has read enough to assume those norms as true, and is interested in postmodernism. As such, ideal places of publication would be the Young Writers' Showcase and literary magazines such as Meanjin, HEAT, and The Lifted Brow.

The questions my major work raises, both about what medium a story exists in, and whether a story ever truly ends are, I believe, fascinating and eye-opening. By inverting the classic 'escapism' of fiction, instead letting the fiction paradoxically escape into reality, I seek to provoke a re-evaluation of how our context influences literature, and how literature influences our context, our lives. It is for this reason I leave the fate of the story in the reader's hands while simultaneously removing their ability to choose, emphasizing both their power over their own mind and their powerlessness over what influences them. "Whether you like it or not, we have changed You – however slight."52

47

Italo Calvino. (1987). The uses of literature : essays. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Melville, H. (1997). Moby Dick. Acclaim Books. (Original work published 1851) 49 Coleridge, S. T. (1798). The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. (Original work published 1798) 50 Student 37625280, Buoyancy, 2025, p.10 51 Wilder, G. (1971, June 30). Pure Imagination [Film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory]. Universal Studios. https://genius.com/Gene-wilder-pure-imagination-lyrics 52 Student 37625280, Buoyancy, 2025, p.21 48