The Inaction Man
By Phillip Donnelly
Copyright 2014 Phillip Donnelly
Second Edition
ISBN: 9781458179340
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Cover image Velib Along the Seine by Michael Rubbo. All rights remain with artist.
For Sandra
Bio Blurb
After completing a psychology degree, the author realised that he was profoundly misanthropic and set about travelling the world looking for aliens to take him to another planet.
Unable to speak any foreign languages and almost incapable of holding a conversation in his own, he decided to teach English as a foreign language because this was the only job that would allow him to travel widely without any marketable skills or noticeable intelligence.
He has unsuccessfully searched for life from outer space in classrooms in the following countries: Spain, China, Russia, Thailand, Beirut, Dubai, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, France and Vietnam. He currently lives in Hong Kong with his patient and long-suffering wife.
In the future, he hopes to continue his search for alien life forms in different countries, and he would be obliged if any aliens reading this could spirit him off to an altogether more exotic planet in a more harmonious dimension.
Message from the Author
If you enjoy these stories, please feel free to tell me so at
[email protected]. If there’s something you didn’t like, or something you feel could have been better, I’d like to know that too.
More information, videos, and assorted odds and ends can be found on my website.
www.phillipdonnelly.net
Acknowledgements
Cover image Velib Along the Seine by Michael Rubbo. All rights remain with artist. See his website for more images.
Thanks to Neil Fitzgerald for all his input and for naming the heroine Illogical Woman.
Fiction
Letters from the Ministry
The Conscript, the Girl and the Virus
The Screen
Boots
Kev the Vampire
Travel Writing
Lebanon – Between East and West
Vietnam – Notes on Nam
China – Me and the Dragon
India – What all the other Books Leave Out
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Fall of the Park of Plants
Chapter 2: Seine Demons
Chapter 3: Origins and Originality
Chapter 4: The Symbol
Chapter 5: Bum Wars
Chapter 6: The Dream of the Dark Lords
Chapter 7: The Screen Teens
Chapter 8: The Sandwich of Doom
Chapter 9: The Prison Ward
Chapter 10: The Illogical Woman
Chapter 11: The Dying of the Light
Chapter 12: Escape from Asylum
Chapter 13: Salvation
Epilogue
Chapter 1
The Fall of the Park of Plants
Inaction Man is a man of his time. Gripped by uncertainty, unsure of where he is, what he is doing, or why he is doing it. The only thing he does know for certain was that what he sees is reality. Others take cloud for substance but his sight pierces the fog of illusion. In the world of the blind, he is the one-eyed monarch. A visionary who can see the cracks and what spills forth from the cracks.
We join Inaction Man in the afternoon of November 15, 2013. He does not know the date, of course, being above petty mortal concerns like days, months and years. With sufficient concentration, and intoxication, he can even forget where he is. This studied ignorance of place and time frees Inaction Man from the power of the space-time continuum. No chain can pull him from A to B. He simply arrives in one location or another. How he got there or where he will go afterwards are matters for fate to decree, its ointment untainted by the fly of volition.
Inaction Man stares into the weak sun, made weaker by the thin web of cloud that hangs over the park. He tries to look behind the sun but its light obscures the dark side. He searches for patterns in the movement of the clouds in the sky. No meaning there. Only fluffy nonsense.
“There are messages everywhere,” he shouts at a tree trunk, “but if you can’t read, how do you know what they say?” Like an illiterate staring at a poster, he knows he is looking at a message of some kind, but is unable to decipher its true meaning. With long dirty nails, he picks away some of the tree’s bark and sniffs it for signs of meaning, but this only provokes a fit of sneezing and a great deal of phlegm. Wiping this yellow liquid on the sleeve of his long coat, this tattered man tries to read a message from the Gods in this mucus but finds none.
When Inaction Man looks up, information carried along retinal nerves and assembled in the visual cortex tell him that he is presently in a large rectangular park. Perhaps this shape is significant, perhaps not. As he contemplates this, he feels the gentle rain swipe a slow and sloppy kiss across his face.
“Lascivious elements, what does this damp caress mean? Why does the sky bathe me?” Inaction Man asks the clouds but they do not answer. There is no meaning here either, he concludes. Rain is a harlot who kisses everyone.
His focus falls to his feet. He looks for meaning in the yellowed leaves that lie around his boots. Leaves that the vampire winds of autumn have bled dry and left desiccated.
The overall picture is clear enough to Inaction Man. The world is dying and he must save it. That much is certain, but what does the hidden text say?
“What does the wind whistle? What do the leaves rustle?” he asks the wind and the leaves.
He walks under a long row of trees, all of whom winter has undressed and left in bony nakedness. Their branches form an arch above Inaction Man, which he takes as a sign that he should walk onwards and look inwards.
He thinks about a recurring dream of his, in which he is ice skating on a lake with his hands tied behind his back. The lake is covered in a thick blanket of fog and he can’t make out the shoreline. Everything is grey: the ice, the fog, even the wind. He can hear the ice begin to crack beneath him. If he stops skating, he knows, his weight will crack the ice and he will fall into the lake, never to return. So he skates and stakes, and waits for the shore to materialise.
As the dream ran and reran in the picture house of his imagination, he trudged back and forth through the carpet of dead leaves in Jardins des Plantes.
He stopped walking when a squirrel ran in front of him. Inaction Man saw this as a sign that he should stop hoarding his thoughts and share them with other creatures. The philosophy of inaction needed propagating. As of yet, he was its only adherent.
Our hero cleared his mind of all distractions and acted from the heart, knowing his heart to be good and true. He acted without thinking but with feeling. This is more difficult than it sounds, raised as we are to do the opposite; and to help Inaction Man act through feeling, he often consumed large quantities of alcohol, as he had done earlier in the day.
Inaction Man took the half-empty bottle of vodka from his chapped lips and stood on a bench. He was out of his mind, in the literal sense. By this I mean that his mind was sitting on a thick branch above the park bench, watching his body sway from side to side, as it garnered the power of the motion of the planet, which Inaction Man would use to add more weight to his words.
A gust of wind crashed into Inaction Man’s face, buffeted by his beard. A sign, no doubt, that it was time to promote inaction by speaking to himself out loud. He did this more and more lately, knowing that words which a
re spoken are more powerful than words which are merely thought. They have a physical force, a presence. He believed that giving his words an auditory form, albeit a temporary one, would bring people to the path of righteousness.
“Sounds die quickly,” he said to the squirrel on the branch beside him, “but they are the sperm that creates thought.”
He cleared his throat and spoke, with a slurred voice that demonstrated his power to alter time.
“I am Inaction Man. I am the light and the way. Look on your works, foolish mortals, and despair. For works are actions, and all action is evil.”
Some passers-by, realising that they were in the company of greatness, stopped to listen. Out of respect, they kept their distance.
“Know you this: to act is evil, to inact divine. Actions are the destroyers of worlds. Only through inaction can our world be saved. By inaction shall action be undone.”
Inaction Man’s animus saw the squirrel stare down from the branch they shared. The nut he carried dropped from its paws and returned to Earth. The power of inaction radiated in all directions.
“Change you ways, wretched sinners. Actors on this stage of death, act not!”
Our hero burped loudly to indicate an imperative of the highest order.
“I am Inaction Man, bringer of peace. Follow me!”
Instead of following him, people moved away from him. To compensate, he became louder, but the louder he became, the further they moved away. Mothers clutched children’s hands and dragged them to a safer and safer distance. Even the squirrel moved up to a higher branch.
Inaction Man noted the relationship between his own volubility and the radius of exclusion. He saw their fear and felt the beginning of their hostility towards him and his words. But what was the cause?
He employed all of his superhero senses to uncover the hidden force which was turning the crowd against him. The breadth and depth of his super sensory perceptions, abetted by the last of the vodka, left his head spinning in a vortex of sensual experience. A thousand voices slushed through his mind, twirling in eddies of fear and frustration.
He swayed on the bench, at first gently but then violently, oscillating wildly, like a planet toppling off its axis.
“I am Inaction Man, and I am very… sensitive!”
Having explained this to the crowd, he fell off the bench and stumbled into the sanctuary of a nearby poinsettia flowerbed. He sank into it and tried to wrap himself in a blanket of dead leaves, which he believed had medicinal qualities.
The crowd began to laugh but Inaction Man didn’t notice. He was experiencing one of his periodic visions. As he lay on the grass with a broken bottle of vodka at this feet, covering himself in rotting plant life, he heard the cries of pain from the leaves he touched. Writhing in their death throes, they begged him to return them to mother tree but Inaction Man could only weep in sympathy. Under the shrieking of the leaves, he heard the sombre munching sound of bacteria feeding. Slow death. Deafening. He opened his eyes to protect him from the sound, but all around him the yellow wind swept away ghost leaves and brought them back to the void.
“Death is everywhere!” he shouted.
On the wake of death floats all kinds of flotsam. Two shape changers moved into his field of vision, their large heads blotting out the sky. Inaction Man shifted his sights downwards and noted that the heads were connected, via necks, to bodies, each one wrapped in the uniform of a park attendant.
“Short, plump and clearly not of this world,” Inaction man whispered to the poinsettias, which nodded their leaves in agreement. Like wax works, the park attendants’ faces held only one expression – contempt. They looked at each other and rolled their eyes to the skies, communicating with the dark lords above.
When they spoke Inaction Man heard their voices as they really were, without the sonic mask that normally accompanies shape shifter speech. They made dark, guttural utterances, completely lacking in vowels and tone. Their words flowed backwards rather than forwards, and at half the speed we would consider normal.
Inaction Man thought he could make out the words “park” and “leave” and “wino” among the distortions. This could only mean one thing. The shape changers must be claiming Jardin des Plantes to be part of the sovereign territory of the dark lords, as they had claimed the Louvre complex the month before. They were banishing Inaction Man once again, on pain of imprisonment in the Montparnasse Tower.
Inaction Man briefly considered defending the park against the shape changer invasion but decided against it. He was outnumbered and night was drawing in. The forces of evil should never be challenged at night – this was when their powers were strongest.
His decision was influenced by resurgent memories of being locked in cells. It was not to his liking. All superheroes have their weak spots, and confinement to Inaction Man was like kryptonite to Superman. Imprisonment left him powerless; and after a prolonged period of time without bathing in star light or swimming in alcoholic vision juice, his mortal personality would reassert itself. He needed to protect his superhero powers by maintaining his vagrant liberty and roaming free.
He spoke to the shape changers as he beat a hasty but tactically necessary retreat.
“I am Inaction Man. Lion of Paris and defender of the one true faith. I shall see you vanquished, shape changers… but not today. A battle does not a war make and I shall return… but not today. All evil will fall to the power of inaction… eventually.”
Thus spake Inaction Man.
Having achieved a moral victory over the shape changers (a victory of words if not of fact), he moved away from them and left the park. Inaction Man was careful, as always, not to turn his back on the shape shifters, in case they attacked him from behind and stabbed him in the back. There is no word for chivalry in the shape changer’s language, but there is a separate appendix for words connected with treachery – subtleties of evil lost on the human mind.
To protect himself, Inaction Man walked backwards all the way through the park to the gated exit near the river, keeping the shape changers in sight at all times. The difficulties of walking backwards meant that our hero crashed into various obstacles, such as rubbish bins and tree trunks. He also fell over a bench at one point, which caused merriment to some onlookers but consternation to those who were sitting on it at the time.
At the gate, Inaction Man lifted both his hands and made a short speech to the park and its panicked residents. Trees wept, grass blades moaned and squirrels were so traumatised that they forgot where they had buried their nuts. “Farewell, my park of plants. Remember me and keep my light in your heart through the darkness to come. I came through and I shall return.”