The Book of Grey
Started March 2004

Chapter 1

Deep in the frozen heart of Antarctica, a door swung wide.

This is not a tale about doors or uncomfortable subzero climates. It may be about hearts, frozen or otherwise, but mostly this story is about a journey, and everybody knows that journeys can't really begin without the noble adventurer opening the door first so they can leave their warm, cozy house in search of some extravagant peril. It's traditional, and I am a strong believer in tradition.

So the door swung wide, opening upon a crisp night sky blazing with thousands of brilliant stars. Pinpoints of light flickered and danced against the reflection of endless snowfields below and, for some, the motion betrayed a restlessness, an eager universe holding its breath. The panorama felt like a sold-out stadium crowd anticipating a second encore; hoarse and subdued from screaming for hours, cigarette lighters held aloft in ragged patches of defiance against the twin enormities of silence and darkness.

It is a well documented fact that Antarctica is the world’s most blusterous continent, boasting katabatic winds that constantly rip through the interior and out to the coast with speeds in excess of two hundred kilometres per hour. With the door gaping open, the winds were patiently still. The rarity of their silence, to some, would indicate that they were waiting also.

At the very end of the world something momentous was about to happen. And with all the attentive weight of the universe bearing down on one galaxy, on one solar system, on one greeny-blue planet, on one frozen continent, on one solitary doorstop, it's no surprise that a little tension was spawned.

The tension writhed and squirmed, snakelike yet bristly, in the shadow of the doorway. It frolicked this way and that, gleefully churning up sheets of snow and generally making a scene, like a newborn baby who has somehow realized that they are in the spotlight and must entertain appropriately. After delightedly spinning in tight circles for several minutes, the infant suspense stopped, gurgled and abruptly threw up scattered chunks of stress all over itself. It looked pleased but the universe was on edge.

As often happens, the tension quickly grew. It became roly-poly from the nutritious attention of the cosmos and soon came to resemble a fat, pulsating sphere. It became so rotund that it could no longer scamper. The obese tensity jiggled with anticipation, looking dangerously about to burst, but the open door continued to withhold relief.

The suspense had just begun to sprout crude appendages when its evolution was abruptly stunted by the sudden emergence of a silhouette shoe from the doorway. The fledgling entity squealed and tried to run, or roll, away with semi-formed legs but the shadowy loafer blindly descended with a crunchy finality, mashing the tension into a gooey paste in the snow. Someone had literally killed the suspense.

The shoe immediately jerked up and away from the murder scene, conceivably upset that its landing spot was occupied by a (now deceased) manifestation of an abstract concept. A stringy trail of tension guts, mostly comprised of sexuality with some drippings of workplace relations, clung to the loafer's heel but they were harmless. The anticipation had been rendered extinct and the universe could finally exhale.

The death-dealing foot lingered hesitantly near the entrance, as if wary of retaliation and waiting for backup before venturing further. It looked around anxiously, the toe pointing first this way, then that, perhaps in astonishment at the carnage, perhaps in search of a path through the deep snowdrifts that would be friendly to stylish loafers. Alas, there was none to be found.

Eventually a second leather loafer inched out of the portal and came to rest beside the first with great caution, hopefully having learnt a lesson in subtlety from the reckless slaughter inflicted by its hasty precursor. However, the arrival of reinforcements had a profound effect on both shoes. The pair was suddenly smug in their duplicity, nervousness vanished now that neither was alone.

A single shoe can never be fully at ease. The absolute need for a companion, a complimentary half, is hard-wired into their essence, for when is a solo piece of footwear truly useful? Without a twin, a shoe is in danger of not being worn, of being relegated to the back of closets and dank basements to be eaten by mould and bugs and dogs and other disgusting things. So for shoes, whose simple, yet profound, goals are to live in a state of perpetual motion and to eventually become martyred from overuse, the concept of solitude is extremely distasteful. This trait is occasionally mirrored in people, which shoes find curious because humans are capable of adventuring whether they have a companion or not.

These particular loafers were no exception to the caste and, finding themselves reunited and fully capable of movement, immediately began to advance on the icy surface: heel-toe, heel-toe, slide-slide-slide. As the shoes strayed further and further from the safety of the doorway, legs slowly began to emerge as well. Further exploration by the feet revealed that a torso was attached to the legs, and arms protruded from the torso. The arrival of a head confirmed the universe's suspicions: the complete arrival was a human being, standard issue according to anatomy textbooks, perhaps a bit short but disappointingly predictable in its construction and manufacture.

Nonetheless, a fully assembled performer had finally taken the stage and the stars silently screamed in unison at his appearance, the sound of their intergalactic commotion millions of light-years away from being heard on Earth. In the unlikely event that the planet manages to survive for any significant period of time, Earth is doomed to eventually be decimated by impossibly powerful shrieks of solar emotion. But for now it is enough to know that a man stands in a doorway opening onto the deathly silent barrens of Antarctica, completely alone.

Meet Grey. He is not tall and dark, nor is he short and light. Neither is he strong, weak, intelligent, dull, handsome or hideous. He isn't loud or quiet, smooth or abrasive, fragrant or scentless. He does not have a delicious, chewy caramel centre. He is neither black or white, but somewhere in between. Grey works in Middle Management.

Grey does not have a past worth speaking of, no elaborate backstory which might help explain the choices he makes and the notions he entertains. There is a past of sorts but it has been buried, shovelful after shovelful of dirt pushing the memories down into a neural crevasse where they won't get in the way. Grey is simply Grey, and all he knows is that he walked through a door and arrived in the coldest place that he could possibly imagine.

Grey stands stock-still and surveys his surroundings, taking in the sheets of white powder drifting lazily across harsh ridges and the night sky awash in fiery speculation. He shivers violently: the temperature is certainly -100 degrees, in Fahrenheit or Celsius or whichever is colder. Seeing no immediate chance of shelter on the bleak horizon, Grey desperately turns back towards the door from whence he came. His only thought is for survival, and it would appear that he has been placed - by who? - in a situation where survival is doubtful at best. He is understandably upset.

All Grey gets is a momentary glimpse of infinity before the door slams in his face, causing him to stagger backwards. His loafers, although trying their hardest, cannot stand up to the environmental stress and slide forwards, creating a fundamental problem in Grey's vertical orientation. As his legs fly up in the air, his head drops just as rapidly and a collision with the ice below becomes quickly inevitable. The impact is spectacular.

From his prone position on the ground, Grey sees the door rising like a monolith in front of him, snuffing out the fiery stars one by one and burning a rift in the sky. The darkness spreads like ink spilt on a masterpiece, devouring the constellations with impunity. The snowfields are rapidly stained black, greedily hoarding the light that they had once refracted so brilliantly. The universe is swallowed in a heartbeat. And finally the door reaches for Grey and he sees nothing at all.

After a few minutes, the door creeps open again.

"Well." The Voice sounds distinctly unimpressed. "He appears to be dead. After approximately ten seconds. Perhaps a defective model?"

"Perhaps he was a mistake. He is, after all, one of yours." This Voice is oily and slick, oozing through the crack between door and frame and dripping down through the snow into the deep places, the warm places, of the earth.

"No," says the first. "No. He is nobody's. But he is not a mistake. Did you notice how the narrative voice changed from past tense to present as soon as he stepped through? That is power. That is importance, twisting the story to fit his needs."

"Hmmmm..." muses the oily Voice, thoughtfully. "Hmmmmm. But it seems that he does not know. He has clearly accepted the fate we have chosen for him." A chuckle as deep as a chasm.

"He must never know!" The first Voice raises, becoming a tempest. "We have risked far too much this time, entrusting a literary character with such a task."

"Fine, fine." A sibilant hiss like grease in a pan, impatient. "But we must bring him back if he is to settle anything, this frail man. Look, see how he turns blue at the extremities. They need more insulation, I've always told you."

A pause. Heat begins to snake from the doorway in tendrils, melting snow and carving troughs in its wake. Icicles that have adorned the doorframe for millennia liquefy, water droplets hissing as they fall to the stoop (which has become visibly red-hot) and immediately return upwards as evaporated trails of mist. The entire door begins to sink as the ancient layers of ice that hold it aloft are ravaged by temperatures that Antarctica has never dreamed of, let alone experienced. The entire baking process takes several seconds.

The original Voice sounds unmistakably angry now, like a quickly gathering storm that has somehow eluded the predictions of even the finest television weatherman.

"What the hell are you doing?"

The heat immediately vanishes and there is the faint sound of breaking glass as drops of water freeze in mid-flight and shatter on the stoop below.

"Insulating him?" The oily Voice snickers and the effect is similar to that of ten thousand snakes watching a mediocre comedy special. "I thought we agreed that the protagonist must be alive for events to continue as planned. It takes effort. We can't all be omnipotent, you know." Another snicker, louder this time: a hundred thousand snakes.

The First laughs too, surprisingly, great rolling waves crashing against a bluff. "Omnipotence, I'd like some of that. Just imagine the possibilities."

"Oh, I can. I can indeed." Oily Voice sounds even more oily. "Although I would venture to guess that our possibilities are drastically different."

The icicles begin dripping again, ever so slowly.

"Stop that." The original Voice is perturbed, laughter forgotten. "Do you think I am a fool? To allow you to resurrect him and instill your twisted bias right from the very beginning? The bargain stated that he was to be pure, neutral. He will make his own decisions."

A sharp hiss. "Given half the chance, you would fill him with so much purity that it would burst out of his mouth like a geyser."

Bated silence, stretching on and on until it seems sure that the roly-poly tension will be returning for an encore. The body of Grey is now extraordinarily blue.

"We will release the Emblem." The First is resigned. "It is the only way to ensure true neutrality."

"Done," says the Oil quickly. "Done and done. He will need something with a little punch on his journey, anyways. These men, these people, are so susceptible. They need air, water, food, shelter... you'd be surprised at how quickly they die when skewered on a meat hook."

"Right." Unmistakable disgust. "Well then. As much as I enjoy our titillating conversations, I have matters to attend to. I assume you remember how to get the Emblem out of storage?"

A gasp of feigned indignance. "Of course, old boy. It hasn't even been a full millennium since the last time."

"Then let us go."

There is another stretch of silence during which one could possibly imagine two Voices searching through infinity's warehouse, peering into boxes that are stacked as far and high as the mind can see. One natters constantly, harping, while the other tolerates with inordinate patience. From time to time the oily Voice will sink a barb, and in these instances a box will accidentally fall from a shelf and land on the verbal offender with a crash. Finally the Emblem is found.

Through the crack in the door a glow suddenly appears, like hundreds of midday Oceania suns melted together and carefully poured into a pot. Its intensity dulls the stars and blinds the snowfields, bathing the barrens in indescribable brightness. Wrenching aside scientific viability, the light races onwards and outwards into the great unknown galaxies at tremendous speeds, dazzling celestial bodies along the way with incandescent flash photography. The glow expands, forcefully prying open the slit between door and frame aside, bubbling over.

Scientists of eighteen different nationalities, stationed in crude base camps circled roughly around the South Pole, all witness what they each proudly claim, in their respective languages, to be the most powerful Aurora Borealis sighting ever. Every single one of them is too enraptured with the glow to take photos.

An astronaut in a shuttle orbiting high above the planet happens to observe, for one brief instant, an Earth without a dark half, without a shadow. Nobody believes him later.

The framework shudders and creaks from the sheer barrage of uncountable light molecules passing through its confines, and the mighty door itself begins to rattle and hiss under the pressure. Boundaries are completely unrecognizable now, the glow ripping them asunder in a flood of molten impatience.

The strain cannot hold, it must not hold, or the world will surely be torn to pieces by the immensity of the glow, breaking into halves and then quarters and then eighths, smaller and smaller until aliens will one day be able to have tiny chunks of Earth in their breakfast cereal.

But the aliens are denied their pleasantries. Just as the glow reaches the universal breaking point of sanity, it is abruptly gone. Vanished without a trace. The world slowly fades back into its mundane colours, and they are a contrasting disappointment.

Now the door stands closed with steam pouring off the frame and skidding merrily across the ground, held close by the freezing cold. The portal is surely unhappy with its day: in the span of a single chapter it has been turned into an instrument of darkness, burnt, frozen and irradiated with light in quick succession. The fact that the door is still standing is a testament to its construction.

The air is still and dark and devoid of Voices. The stars blanketing the horizon regain their splendor but appear slightly more subdued, perhaps ashamed of the ease with which they were blinded and brushed aside. They are quiet now, sleepy, their personification coming to a close.

Grey is also quiet, lying motionless on his back on the ice. A cursory examination would suggest that the breathtaking glow was all for nothing, that it was little more than the most spectacular pyrotechnic display that history has ever known. But upon closer inspection, Grey's skin appears to be less pallid and his chest is moving ever so slightly with the power of breath. And on his chest, directly over his heart, rests a small bronze coin.

Time passes. Maybe seconds, maybe minutes, maybe hours.

And the door opens once more, furtively, for the third and final time. A manila envelope sails out of the portal and floats, dancing in a wind that the barrens still do not feel, until it slowly descends and settles to rest beside Grey's transfixed hand. At this point it would be appropriate for music to play, either ominous or triumphant, but there is only silence.

Deep in the frozen heart of Antarctica, a door slams shut.

Chapter 2

Jack and Jill were once in love.

This is not an idealistic story of childhood sweethearts, no romanticized tale of a couple who shared swings in kindergarten, a locker in grade six and forty-ouncers in the high school parking lot. Jack and Jill were simply two stereotypically bored college co-eds, drawn together by the mutual hilarity they found in repeatedly slurring through the children’s nursery rhyme that bonded their names together: “Jack and Jill went up the hill…”

After downing multiple pints and annoying the entire pub with their sing-song inside joke, which was really too funny to be funny at all, Jack and Jill stumbled up the hill to get it on. The ensuing aural debauchery deeply disturbed all of Jack’s roommates, who could only be grateful that they all owned speakers with enough decibel capacity to drown out the sounds: “To fetch…OH!…a pail…omigod!…of water…” The whole exercise was an entirely vulgar display of passion and an admirable disdain for the sanctity of childhood.

Much later on, the faintest hint of a fluorescent pink Valentine’s heart arose from somewhere amongst the pair of prone bodies discordantly heaped across the bed. It floated near the ceiling, too transparent to be real and too opaque to pass as a momentary hallucination. Unaware of the marvelous foreshadowing hovering above them, Jill dreamed vividly of God while Jack wrestled with Satan.

The next morning, the pair successfully weathered the prerequisite awkwardness borne of drunkenly fucking a virtual stranger because your names form a couplet in a nursery rhyme. Jill gave Jack a fake phone number and pranced home to her dormitory, gleefully splashing in puddles the entire way, while Jack made lunch and wondered why everyone in the house was surreptitiously avoiding him. The (imaginary?) heart was gone without a trace.

Irresponsible Jack lost the false digits before he could discover that they belonged to an elderly Irish woman with a faulty hearing aid. Jill experienced a brief spasm of guilt while relating the incident to her roommate, but wrote off the awkward feeling as mild indigestion and decided to skip all her afternoon classes.

Jack and Jill did not meet again for several years. They did, however, pass each other several times without recognition in crowded bar interiors and academic hallways, always too preoccupied to make eye contact and finish the rhyme: "Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after."

They didn't really need to recite the line. Jack was halfheartedly working towards a liberal arts degree which, he suspected, was providing him with the terrible knowledge of how much the world sucks while dooming him to fast food employment following graduation. Jill failed out of her program after drinking too much and was later re-admitted on conditional terms, which she was able to marginally achieve between all-night benders. Neither was exceptionally happy.

Jill suffered through a series of trivial relationships with eye-candy boys that she seduced (mostly out of habit) while traipsing around the meat-market club circuit. An intelligent girl despite her borderline alcoholism, Jill soon became tired of conversations that seemed to exist only as a precursor to sex, a hollow vessel for carnal anticipation. Her attractiveness began to weigh at her like an anchor, dragging her down into the depths of an ocean where predators blindly pursued her scent, unaware and uncaring of whatever true beauty she had left.

Trapped in a vicious cycle with no ending in sight, Jill became sick: Sick of being asked what her major was. Sick of gossiping about mutual acquaintances that she could care less about. Sick of idiots and their flagrant overcompensation.

Jack briefly found joy in the arms of a vacuous frosh girl, ignoring the blank look in her wide-eyed gaze as he whispered overblown sentiments of love into her perfectly formed ear. Her disinterest soon became impossible to ignore and Jack turned to the whining dramatizations of his indie music albums for consolation, living his pseudo-romance through the lyricism of singers too cool to be famous.

The girl soon completely lost interest in Jack's attentions and it was his turn to be wide-eyed when she informed him, quite bluntly, one day that she had been experimenting with boys in her co-ed residence. Such activities were widely known as 'Floorcest' and reviled among post-secondary scholars as causing unnecessary tension aboard dorm floors, in much the same way as incest is unnecessary elsewhere.

Jack abandoned the shipwreck and swam for safety, weeping bitterly at the treachery he had endured. Although he spent several weeks writing terrible, incomplete poetry about betrayal and discarded love, his heart wasn't really in it - ultimately, not even total delusion can turn a vapid slut into a dreamboat.

Robbed of his chance for bitterness, Jack became tired: Tired of the false portrait of love painted by his melodramatic music. Tired of his friends urging him to rebound with this girl or that girl. Tired of looking for something that didn't exist.

Where was love?

DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!