The following is a short story-come-book review inspired by ‘The Third Policeman’ by Flann O’Brien. If you haven’t read the book then don’t read my account of it first, that would be daft.

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This could well be a re-telling of an older story. One which you will likely know or at least recognise, a familiar pancake. In order to do the story justice I’ll have to explain a few momentary details, temporal nuggets which should illustrate key differences between this time and another from history. Confusingly, I will do this as part of the story, which itself isn’t actually a story but a review.

I spent the morning staring somewhat creatively at my box. That ought not to sound lewd, it is a feature of our daily lives here in the now. You can use your box for more euphemistic purposes than those which I will describe but that is by-the-by. Most thorough going members of society nowadays will have a box collection; one big one for the at-home-staring experience, one portable box for mobile staring and maybe a couple of incidental boxes which you might stare at from time to time but are not central to our day-to-day functioning. That said, each box contains enough parts of us that are so instrumental and imperative that they actually contain our identity – what we are, or at least what we think we are. These are tricky pancakes however for as long as we stare into them, they tell us more about who we are. Each box has a Machiavellian shimmer or glimmer about it, we may stare into the box long enough that it changes what we see in ourselves. Or, we can stare at the box with a deep vacuousness and it will reflect back a shallow type of fullness which we may take into our daily performances as comfort for the fact that we are somehow so reliant on our box collection in the first instance. Lastly, this is a particularly dangerous performative twinkle which our boxes are very good at, they will take the disparate strands of our being and link them into a wholeness which is uncannily believable. The boxes achieve these hitherto unbeknownst feats of ridiculum through a simple conjuring trick; inside each box is a series of other boxes. Each box is really as empty as the next. The majority of boxes get away with this clever trickery by their agile  and subtle build; the boxes fit more boxes which the user is at liberty to shuffle around at their leisure. This is what I was doing when I began the incident at hand.

My own boxes run a similar OS to most others; inside are three main boxes which I will rotate and use for their mirror like qualities. I was doing exactly this when I had rather a scare. Quite a fright in-fact. I was knocked several feet clear of the floor where I normally reside and thrown upwards into the surrounding phatic air and then landed unceremoniously back on the ground. To my side my upturned bicycle spun, I looked up to see a man glance up from behind inside a particularly shiny box. I won’t dwell overly on the class dynamics of my society but those who are particularly empty may express this through larger boxes which assist in their otherwise limited social mobility. I’m unluckily nimble and heavy in the expressions to boot – meaning I have a rudimentary form of travel assistance; the aforementioned bicycle. Anyway as this collision drew out and the other man took off in a bluster, I was left staring down at a tragic sight. My box  (which meant rather a lot to me considering it contained my central identity,) was broken into more than it’s constituent parts (these parts were broken into smaller parts, meaning there were parts more numerous yet of the same overall particulate quantity (one thing these boxes cannot yet do is make particles dissipate)). While there are clear and explicit warnings given to us – those who have to ride the bicycle – that we should not inspect the box while we ride, these are easily ignored. Equally, those who are carried by their box from place to place are encouraged to pay attention to its shiny surfaces as it traverses. This incongruence in the art of boxing had struck to serve me with the aforementioned fright. Quite a shock is a broken box.

I carried home the fragments of my box. I was despondent and confused to say the least. I re-arranged the pieces so that they resembled what was once my box, which in turn resembled me as far as I could remember. No matter how I tried to jam the bits together they didn’t appear correct. They didn’t resemble me. I didn’t resemble me. I was fast unwinding. Not just metaphysically but with the shear frustration and anger of the situation which had unfolded. I was firstly a victim of societal injustice and then held to ransom by the great jigsaw puzzle of life. What’s more my own being wanted me to build legoland with jigsaw pieces. None of it made any sense and I soon drifted out of consciousness.

When I awoke, there in-front of me, was my box. It had re-assembled itself whilst I had passed into a transcendent slumber, freed of the reciprocal reflective impulse which we had previously shared. I examined it, it was pretty certainly, overly masculine arguably, but in truth there was nothing overtly special about the box, even though it was mine and it contained my identity. I prodded it, wanting to retrieve my particulars if at all possible. It glimmered angrily. There was a mutual suggestion from it to me and me to it, that I had forgotten something particular which would help me retrieve my particulars. I had forgotten a word or phrase which would unlock the missing parts of me. I struggled momentarily before my consciousness lapsed again.

This time when I came to I felt further from the box than before, emotionally speaking. It was, after all, just a box. That said, I had left my bleeding identity inside it. A conflicting pancake. I got up unsteadily and glanced around me. The space I was in shimmered dully, a thin film of grey matter covered everything. I started to recognise things which had been represented back at me in the box only shinier. The boxy filter was gone now and the golden light-sheen which had covered my life seemed like a very distant and unrealistic dream. Yet there, on what I took to be a table, was the box. I laughed at its haunting presence. It’s cracked sides which had been rudimentally stuck back together reflected a space where the missing phrase should have been .

********

I stood in that room, the thick grey air coming up in unfamiliar plumes as I moved ineloquently around. I disturbed what I could in the room, my curiosity and distant sense of familiarity creating an unnerving energy within me. I had to find the missing phrase, I had to get my identity back before it was lost forever in the box. The objects I overturned and upended were exciting at first but soon became quotidian. I soon determined to retrieve the bicycle I had left when I had been struck by the large shiny box and the social injustice. I walked through the empty streets attempting to recollect where it was that I had left that bicycle. In the windows around me, faces glowed with the pleasure of their own company reflected back at themselves. Occasionally a fellow cyclist would trickle past, their box framed upon the handlebars, reflecting everything back to the cyclist in 1080p. Large shiny boxes would whoosh past like a shadowy wind; no real sign that there was indeed a person inside such was their incredible vacuousness. I soon reached the upturned vehicle, it front wheel trickling like a small stream. I searched around it abjectly for the phrase but made no headway. I cut my losses and walked the bicycle back to the box in the room, it sat glowing the same ******** maliciously still. Evidence of the forgotten phrase and of my fracturing self.

The retreat I felt from myself I felt those first few nights was terrible, I wouldn’t wish it on a living soul – if there is indeed such a thing. I began to wake daily with the rhythms of the world around me, alone in my comings and goings yet surrounded by those occupied with their own facile reflection. I hated them and their boxes, partly because I was alone and partly because I was reminded daily of what I had lost – the box I had once cherished had even started screeching at the same moment every day, still displaying the same old ********.

In my fragile and lonely state I began to seriously investigate what had happened to me, how had I become uncoupled from my box? How had I been enraptured in the first instance? My investigations took me firstly, throughout my house. I found a series of rectangles which opened with a strange and entrancing trickle like that of a bicycle wheel with a good hub or a satisfying, slow and rhythmic backpedal over a freewheel. These rectangles were partial to the grey substance I know now as ‘dust’. They were made up of smaller thinner rectangles which transported the user inside themselves in a way not dissimilar to the box. I know of them now, through my own investigations as books filled with pages however I will continue to refer to them as rectangles as that is how I though of them in the early days of my freedom. These ‘pages’ didn’t reflect however, they were dull and dead to the touch. My abode was oddly full of them and I began to transcribe the secrets of each rectangle into myself, each time keeping a little something which I figured may be the missing piece – the phrase I couldn’t remember, the cracks in the box.

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It all led to today and the rectangle which is labelled ‘The Third Policeman’ by Flann O’brien. It is a most beguiling and entrancing rectangle. One which I can’t seem to decode, try as I might. It was sat by my bedside, where I must have left it before I became one with the box. There were a few peculiarities involved yet again. Firstly, inside the rectangle was a phrase… The phrase.

********

The rectangle opened up my box in a manner of speaking, yet it no longer had the same charm. The build had been shattered in the collision with the man in the large box. Perhaps that was why it didn’t work as well any more. I could still examine the small boxes inside but they too had lost their charm. Instead I kept turning back to the rectangle which had unlocked the box – ‘The Third Policeman’.

Another of the peculiarities was a note inside the rectangle, written by own hand. It said that this rectangle had come by way of recommendation of a Benny Profane, a name I couldn’t remember or forget, beside it was the scrawled outline of a story which was familiar and too incomplete to draw anything from. Inside I felt the vague notion that I had indeed written that note, that it was torn from somewhere which was equally inaccessible. The floating noise of a radio-wave through the space I would later, and used to, call ‘wireless’ drifted to my memory. It was there, in my memory. A conversation with this Benny Profane or a sound brought to me by radio, had prompted me to find this rectangle which contained another inexplicable peculiarity. Inside the impenetrable text between two yellowed leaves marked ‘115’ and ‘116’ – a small ill fitting note with the words “‘The Society for Psychical Research’  – ‘Telephone 01-937 8994’ ‘1 Adam and Eve Mews, London, W8 6UG’ ‘ With the Secretary’s Compliments’“. This is the part which has confounded me truly. Try as I might I cannot find an explanation for that note being inside this rectangle. Perhaps someone put it there? Perhaps it was me? For me?

Through all my investigations I can ascertain that the particular rectangle I have got has been in circulation since the year 1976. A long-time before the boxes showed up. I still slowly pick my way through the text again and again before tripping accidentally down a trap and emerging as confused as when I started. The fascination I’d once held with my box pales in comparison. They must be linked however, this rectangle and the box, for this rectangle contained the phrase I’d been searching for which allowed me to access my identity, fractured though it now is. That phrase was a truly liberating one, to say I was flattened would do the author some disservice, the phrase was as mystical and enticing as you’re likely to configure on any box, rectangle or bicycle. It was, of course

********
P*******
PA******
PAN*****
PANC****
PANCA***
PANCAK**
PANCAKE*
PANCAKES.

‘pancakes’.

P.S – I’m left with more questions than I’ve answered, some which may never be answered – namely that of the note marked ‘The Society for Psychical Research’ which I found. Perhaps this is question best left unanswered?

I’ve returned to my box intermittently to continue with my investigations regarding the phenomena of boxes themselves. I’m no further forward but the identity which I once held so dear is no longer so fixed. It is malleable and unbounded by a box. I have mastered the box, I changed my identity to suit the box and all it’s smaller boxes. It knows me as Mr Hummels and thusly reflects back the absence that is Mr Hummels. I sit here suspended in the fluid nothingness of non-identity, wondering if I can re-claim what was lost to the box, or if I’d even want to? The comfort of my alternate is better than the box I once knew and less permanent. There are moments when I wish I could travel quickly through all the streets and spaces like those in the shiniest of boxes but then I realise that it wouldn’t be travelling in any case. It would be the box and the notion the box projects. The most comfort I can get here in amorphous nothingness of reality is from the identity of non-identity which I created in the box. I have can try and keep a handle on my interactions with the box this way. Additionally I’ve made some efforts to further the cause of the bicycle in my own reality as I described it and in the unreality of the box which I share. They seem to be the easiest way to bridge the curious gap between reality and unreality, identity and non-identity. Plus it has to be said, they are a rather enjoyable pancake in any case. From what I can gather, the rectangle which began this whole dastardly cycle of splitting and fracturing, is a thoroughly good unfinished investigation. I look forward to finishing the rectangle, I doubt I will likely get to the bottom of the investigation – that of my identity.

 

Mr Hummels

 

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