Daydream II

Batty was misbehaving.

Not that she could tell, she thought sulkily, for he wasn’t materialising at all. She poked her pen at his blurry, inert form. It rolled over and emitted comic snores. She rolled her eyes. Fine. Today was not to be a writing day. Well and good.

She slumped against her pillows. Was she bored? No! No. Yes. Yes, she was. Damn and blast; she was bored. She felt guilty admitting to being bored; she was always of the opinion that one should never be bored, not with the world and the world of the mind to explore. It was a sin to be bored.

But she was.

It was time, perhaps, to explore the new house; she had not yet had the luxury of examining it, stripping description and memory from the walls’ very pores. It was only last week she had announced to her mother that she had just noticed the exterior walls were brick. Yes. Her tendency to notice things was fading; was she finally calm again? They said she was anxious; high strung; teetering on the verge of nervous breakdowns—yet… she felt no more tightly wound than the next person. Everyone had their little bags of stress and hers was simply difficult for her, personally, to shoulder—she had such sloping shoulders, after all! It was simply a matter of learning how to balance.

Batty, of course, would have tremendous amounts of balance. A supremely stable sense of proportion. He would be level-headed; he would not overthink; he would be gracious and kind to all and mean it.

She thought he sounded insufferable.

Perhaps it were best that he were not written. He was, after all, merely a product of her imagination; she hadn’t yet fleshed him out and there was no need to, really. He could lie, dormant, until she needed him. If she’d need him.

He was too perfect—therein was the rub. She was too enamoured by him at first to truly find out who he was; instead, she had bestowed (cursed, she wondered?) him with society’s ideal traits and failed to acknowledge his weaknesses. Not that she knew what they were. Batty was, she lamented, more a background character than a character upon whom to focus; she knew little about him—and, she confessed, did not yet care enough to find out.

He was not, though, the type to be relegated to the background. She felt he had promise; he was as real to her as her tiny dwellers were—and, just like her tiny dwellers, just as reticent and secretive.

She did not hate her tiny dwellers for their taciturn behaviour, of course. It would much—too much—to ask that the tiny dwellers to make themselves known to people. They would be peppered with questions; prodded; poked; slid under microscopes and exposed to radiation. She couldn’t do that to them. She couldn’t even tell them that she knew of their existence.

Because they did exist; they existed as surely as she did. (She refused to start waxing existential, not during the holidays. She did, however, allow herself a little pause to tell herself a little joke about Descartes and bars.) She spied evidence here and there: a half-dusted miniature footprint on the windowsill; an inexplicable length of string dangling from a low nail; the irrefutable fact that, for instance, honeydew melons were paler closer to the seeds. (They were so because the tiny dwellers injected green dye into the melon, and the dye’s pigments could only spread so far. The orange of rockmelons and, indeed, the bright warm colours of every other fruit, managed to penetrate fruits’ flesh rather well. It puzzled the tiny dwellers so, but no one seemed to mind.)

She knew they were a silly whim. No, she didn’t—she knew that others thought she knew they were a silly whim (how convoluted that felt!); she herself knew that it wasn’t quite a silly whim but a dreadfully logical explanation of the natural world at large. If tiny people couldn’t exist because one couldn’t see them, then, in the same way, established deities mustn’t exist, nor would… newly-born stars. And newly born stars, if not established deities, surely did exist. Things did not have to be seen to exist; they simply had to be believed in. If one believed fervently enough, things came into existence—even if things existed only in one’s imagination. But, as one’s imagination exists… then by absurd logical implications, the things of one’s imagination must also exist on another plane, another distant reality. Reality was only a consensus agreement, after all.

She did wish she could share her tiny dwellers with others but even those who didn’t tease them (the ridicule levelled at her little societies years ago still smarted!) didn’t quite get it; they didn’t quite… understand. They understood, of course, on a very basic level—she believed tiny dwellers existed—but they couldn’t believe themselves, and she found that very odd. Humans were so terribly good at believing in other things: other, less tangible things (like ascribing significance to mere coincidence); other, terribly narcissistic things (like the idea that one can do anything one can set one’s mind to) and yet the existence of miniature people appealed to neither their innate need for causality nor their egotism.

Perhaps, she ruminated, humanity was simply far too self-centered to notice smaller versions of themselves; far too self-absorbed and egotistic to even imagine that there could be anything remotely similar to humans. Everything was explained away by science, by natural causes, by the human psyche—the mere thought of the world working by the hands of something so similar to humans was... terrifying. Science was perfect; science was malleable. The minds of sentient beings (however small in stature such beings were) struck her as far less controllable. No wonder they were so unpalatable to most!

She tapped her pen. If the human race gave up trying to explain the world in ways that allowed humans to control and harness the world, would people actually see the tiny dwellers as easily as she did?