THE HEAT DEATH OF MR UNIVERSE | Rhys Hughes
One afternoon, Thornton Excelsior decided to take his old bicycle for a spin. And then, when it was sufficiently giddy, he mounted it and set off at high speed towards the far end of this sentence, but the brakes of the machine were faulty and he ended up skidding beyond the full stop into the margin, right off the edge of the page and into a completely different story by a writer he’d never heard of.
He was frightened by his peculiar plight!
“What if I don’t fit in? What if the other characters hate me?” were his twin concerns as he glanced around.
He was in a residential suburb of a city. Above the modest roofs of the beehive houses, oddly shaped towers rose in the hazy distance; and a low rumble of traffic reached his ears like… He frowned, unable to think of a simile. Like chastisement, he eventually decided. Whilst congratulating himself on this comparison, a hand suddenly tapped his left shoulder and a voice rasped, “So you came at last!”
Thornton hadn’t seen or heard anybody approach. And yet this was an enormous man to be so stealthy; his muscles bulged so conspicuously that they were more like geological features. He was bald, tanned and dressed only in long johns, apart from his massive feet, which were hirsute, pallid and scabbarded in transparent slippers. His veins throbbed and his cheeks glowed with relief. He leaned closer.
“Allow me to introduce myself. I am the Musulman Muscle Man. I am responsible for bringing you across.”
Thornton shook his head firmly and replied, “That’s incorrect, it was a simple accident. I went too fast and missed my turn and switched texts. It might happen to any fictional cyclist.”
“Yes, but it was I who sabotaged your brakes!”
“Impossible. Only the author of my story could do that, and you aren’t him, that’s for sure. What’s going on?”
“You misunderstand. I begged the author of your story to do it. And he obliged on a whim. Typical of him.”
Thornton digested this news. It was plausible enough. So he narrowed his eyes and stared at this stranger in the way that characters used to stare at strangers in novels. Most don’t bother now. “But why did you beg him to do that? Was it blatant mischief?”
“Heavens no! What do you take me for? I’m a moral fellow every day and normally wouldn’t dream of abducting, directly or indirectly, anyone from a different fictional universe, but this is an emergency. I have a wife and I’m terrified of her. She’s expecting me back home any moment but I can’t face meeting her. I want you to go instead. Pretend to be me. Stroll into my house and say hello to her…”
“But I look nothing like you!”
“That’s the point! My wife would suspect trickery if a man turned up who was a perfect replica of myself. If she sees someone who is the exact physical opposite of me, her suspicions won’t be aroused. She’ll assume that no deception is taking place.”
“Your wife is a simple minded woman?”
“By no means!” The Musulman Muscle Man glowered at Thornton as if he resented this mild disparagement of a female he himself intended to brutally deceive. It’s a common paradox, another case of‘I’m allowed to complain about it but you aren’t’. Thornton had encountered this attitude often in his life. He sighed and said:
“Don’t you have any friends or neighbours to ask?”
“Yes, but… they aren’t human.”
“Your request has unnerved me to a considerable degree. I don’t like the fact my author colluded with you to put me in this position but there’s nothing I can do about it on my own. My author never listens to me. Who knows why he favours you instead?”
“I’m the Musulman Muscle Man, that’s why. I lift his spirits when he feels down, I’m really that strong.”
Thornton capitulated. “I don’t suppose I have any choice in the matter. If I do what you ask, will you guarantee that I’ll be returned to my own story, the tale I’m meant to occupy?”
“I can’t actually promise such an outcome, but I swear to intercede on your behalf with your author. And I’ll look after your bicycle while you enter my house and greet my wife.”
“Which house is yours?” Thornton squinted.
The Musulman Muscle Man pointed at a beehive that looked the same as all the others in the area. “There.”
“But what shall I say to her when I go inside?”
“Just the usual. You know.”
Thornton nodded. “Hi honey, I’m home!”
I used to have robes and a turban (wrote the Musulman Muscle Man) but as I grew stronger and stronger they burst apart. Then I knew I was ready to enter the Mr Universe competition.
But that event isn’t just about physical force.
No, mental discipline is required too. And spiritual focus. I trekked to Yuckystan to find a guru to engage. To employ, I mean, not to marry!
At last I found the Smarmy Swami. He coached me. He drove me in his old bus to his base. It was covered in flakes of burned wood and a male sheep wandered about on its own. “Ashram!”
The Smarmy Swami stopped the bus. I got out.
“This is my pad,” he announced.
He wanted me to read between the lines.
But I didn’t know how. That was one of the things I needed coaching for. Nonetheless, I settled in nicely.
My mystical education began immediately.
The Smarmy Swami taught me to meditate, contemplate, levitate and masticate. He taught me to gravitate. He taught me to gesticulate. But he never taught me to do anything rude.
I spent six months at the ashram and my mind expanded so much that I had to roll it up like a carpet every single night to get it back inside my head before I went to sleep. Luckily, some nights weren’t single but had long-term lovers, and then it was acceptable to leave my mind expanded to its fullest extent, like a prehistoric sea.
Finally I was ready. I bade a farewell to the Smarmy Swami and paid his fare (well, I had to) on his bungalow stairwell. Like all bungalows it only had one floor, but that floor was vertical. Anyhow, I girded my loins and evaded the lions and set off anew.
The Mr Universe competition for the year Umpteen AD was due to be held in Grimwood City. I went there and registered my name. For a week I did battle on the stages of Body Hall.
My rivals were immensely forceful entities, half giant, half vegetable, half cliff, half badly added fraction, half recycled joke, and the ones with roots planted in the stage floor were certainly no pushovers. But I won at the end. Sheer determination on my part.
I stood on the podium and accepted the medal. A disc carved from the heart of a neutron star, it was. Dense.
Only Mr Universe is strong enough to wear it.
And then I hiked back here.
But on the way home, I started thinking about many things. About my domestic situation, about my wife and how terrible she is with that nest of venomous springs on her head. I told her not to get her snakes permed but she didn’t listen. Hot tongs hissed and the serpents hissed back and I bet secrets were shared between them.
The fact I had married a gorgon was my own fault. I had prayed to my author for a ‘gorgeous’ bride and I guess he misheard. Or perhaps he just decided to play a mean joke on me…
I reached the outskirts of my suburb and I was trembling all over and my muscles were rubbing against each other like magnified walnuts, but then the author of the story adjacent to this one groaned loudly. The walls between the tales around here are so thin. Shoddy workmanship. I knew he wanted his spirits lifting again.
So I obliged. I lifted them as high as I could.
Much higher than ever before!
But I was still distracted by my predicament and my anxiety made me clumsy and to my horror I dropped them. I dropped his spirits! And they jarred as they hit the hard ground.
Something broke inside them. And the author hasn’t been right since. He sprawled over into this text, even though it doesn’t belong to him, and made changes. Random alterations.
I believe he’s gone mad, frankly. And that explains why things happen in the new stories he writes that make no sense at all. And not only in his own work, but in the work of any author that he can reach from where he is. The houses in this suburb suddenly turned into beehives. That was the first change I noticed. Not the last.
You see those towers in the distance? They are gigantic flowers. And that low rumble you noticed isn’t traffic but the hum of the occupants of the beehives. Yes, it’s obvious now.
But as for my wife. Ah! Don’t expect her to be a bee. She was always sweeter than that, so sweet indeed that she went over the ultimate edge of sweetness and returned at the bottom, where the sourness and bitterness is extreme, unbearable, even demonic.
And that’s why I’m scared of her.
Listen. It’s your bicycle that can travel between stories. That’s what I asked your author to do. Invent a bicycle that can roll over the margins of texts and enter those written by other writers. You brought it here for me and now I plan to steal it. I’m sorry.
But at least I’ve left this letter in its place, to explain my actions. And if you survive the encounter with my wife, you’ll be able to read it at your leisure. Good luck. And best regards!
The Musulman Muscle Man
Thornton pushed open the unlocked door. He found himself in a hall and at the end of the hall was another door and beyond this door he heard the sound of something creaking oddly.
He preferred orthodox creakings, Thornton did.
But he persisted with his quest.
He reached for the handle, turned it and yanked the second door wide. Before his eyes had time to register the scene beyond, he stepped bravely over the threshold. Then he blinked.
What he saw was remarkable but not evil.
A pyramid of honey jars that reached almost to the high ceiling.
Many different kinds of honey were present here and some jars were positioned upside down; and of these, a few had leaked through their screwtop seals and slow cascades of honey poured down the glass sides of lower jars. It was an endless oozing, primeval and sickly. Runny honey and solid, clear and cloudy, crystalline and smooth.
And there was no doubt this was the wife.
Transformed into a ziggurat of the trapped congealment of bees’
love. An unusual change for a woman!
Even more bizarre for a gorgon, surely?
Floorboards creaked under it.
And it was tall, tall, tall, this sticky structure.
Hundreds of jars, thousands.
So Thornton said the only appropriate thing:
“High honey! I’m home!”
The pyramid of honey jars seemed to sigh. Then it said sternly, “I can see that, but why pick a bungalow?”
“What do you mean?” gasped Thornton.
“You’ve turned into a home, just as you announced, but couldn’t you have chosen to become a castle or a mansion or a manor or even just a big detached house with a garden?”
Thornton staggered to the nearest mirror on the wall. He had changed without any warning into an abode. A vertical bungalow. In the highest window of the house he saw a tiny face with a matted beard, a face that laughed before it squeaked words:
“I am the Smarmy Swami! Welcome to my ashram!”
Thornton blundered his way out.
The Musulman Muscle Man had scarpered.
Thornton picked up his note.
But he typically read the wrong side first.
P.S.
Since I won the Mr Universe competition and became Mr Universe himself, I’ve noticed internal changes too. I’m cooling down. My cells are dying one by one, some turning into black dwarves, others into black holes. I’ve stopped expanding, no matter how much I eat. In fact I think it is likely I’ll start contracting soon and probably I’ll turn into a singularity that will explode and start the entire process again. A universe is like a set of lungs, breathing in, out, in, out.
And each breath is the lifespan of a single creation.
One afternoon, Thornton Excelsior decided to take his old bicycle for a spin. And then, when it was sufficiently giddy, he mounted it and set off at high speed towards the far end of this sentence, but the brakes of the machine were faulty and he ended up skidding beyond the full stop into the margin, right off the edge of the page and into a completely different story by a writer he’d never heard of.
He was frightened by his peculiar plight!
“What if I don’t fit in? What if the other characters hate me?” were his twin concerns as he glanced around.
He was in a residential suburb of a city. Above the modest roofs of the beehive houses, oddly shaped towers rose in the hazy distance; and a low rumble of traffic reached his ears like… He frowned, unable to think of a simile. Like chastisement, he eventually decided. Whilst congratulating himself on this comparison, a hand suddenly tapped his left shoulder and a voice rasped, “So you came at last!”
Thornton hadn’t seen or heard anybody approach. And yet this was an enormous man to be so stealthy; his muscles bulged so conspicuously that they were more like geological features. He was bald, tanned and dressed only in long johns, apart from his massive feet, which were hirsute, pallid and scabbarded in transparent slippers. His veins throbbed and his cheeks glowed with relief. He leaned closer.
“Allow me to introduce myself. I am the Musulman Muscle Man. I am responsible for bringing you across.”
Thornton shook his head firmly and replied, “That’s incorrect, it was a simple accident. I went too fast and missed my turn and switched texts. It might happen to any fictional cyclist.”
“Yes, but it was I who sabotaged your brakes!”
“Impossible. Only the author of my story could do that, and you aren’t him, that’s for sure. What’s going on?”
“You misunderstand. I begged the author of your story to do it. And he obliged on a whim. Typical of him.”
Thornton digested this news. It was plausible enough. So he narrowed his eyes and stared at this stranger in the way that characters used to stare at strangers in novels. Most don’t bother now. “But why did you beg him to do that? Was it blatant mischief?”
“Heavens no! What do you take me for? I’m a moral fellow every day and normally wouldn’t dream of abducting, directly or indirectly, anyone from a different fictional universe, but this is an emergency. I have a wife and I’m terrified of her. She’s expecting me back home any moment but I can’t face meeting her. I want you to go instead. Pretend to be me. Stroll into my house and say hello to her…”
“But I look nothing like you!”
“That’s the point! My wife would suspect trickery if a man turned up who was a perfect replica of myself. If she sees someone who is the exact physical opposite of me, her suspicions won’t be aroused. She’ll assume that no deception is taking place.”
“Your wife is a simple minded woman?”
“By no means!” The Musulman Muscle Man glowered at Thornton as if he resented this mild disparagement of a female he himself intended to brutally deceive. It’s a common paradox, another case of‘I’m allowed to complain about it but you aren’t’. Thornton had encountered this attitude often in his life. He sighed and said:
“Don’t you have any friends or neighbours to ask?”
“Yes, but… they aren’t human.”
“Your request has unnerved me to a considerable degree. I don’t like the fact my author colluded with you to put me in this position but there’s nothing I can do about it on my own. My author never listens to me. Who knows why he favours you instead?”
“I’m the Musulman Muscle Man, that’s why. I lift his spirits when he feels down, I’m really that strong.”
Thornton capitulated. “I don’t suppose I have any choice in the matter. If I do what you ask, will you guarantee that I’ll be returned to my own story, the tale I’m meant to occupy?”
“I can’t actually promise such an outcome, but I swear to intercede on your behalf with your author. And I’ll look after your bicycle while you enter my house and greet my wife.”
“Which house is yours?” Thornton squinted.
The Musulman Muscle Man pointed at a beehive that looked the same as all the others in the area. “There.”
“But what shall I say to her when I go inside?”
“Just the usual. You know.”
Thornton nodded. “Hi honey, I’m home!”
I used to have robes and a turban (wrote the Musulman Muscle Man) but as I grew stronger and stronger they burst apart. Then I knew I was ready to enter the Mr Universe competition.
But that event isn’t just about physical force.
No, mental discipline is required too. And spiritual focus. I trekked to Yuckystan to find a guru to engage. To employ, I mean, not to marry!
At last I found the Smarmy Swami. He coached me. He drove me in his old bus to his base. It was covered in flakes of burned wood and a male sheep wandered about on its own. “Ashram!”
The Smarmy Swami stopped the bus. I got out.
“This is my pad,” he announced.
He wanted me to read between the lines.
But I didn’t know how. That was one of the things I needed coaching for. Nonetheless, I settled in nicely.
My mystical education began immediately.
The Smarmy Swami taught me to meditate, contemplate, levitate and masticate. He taught me to gravitate. He taught me to gesticulate. But he never taught me to do anything rude.
I spent six months at the ashram and my mind expanded so much that I had to roll it up like a carpet every single night to get it back inside my head before I went to sleep. Luckily, some nights weren’t single but had long-term lovers, and then it was acceptable to leave my mind expanded to its fullest extent, like a prehistoric sea.
Finally I was ready. I bade a farewell to the Smarmy Swami and paid his fare (well, I had to) on his bungalow stairwell. Like all bungalows it only had one floor, but that floor was vertical. Anyhow, I girded my loins and evaded the lions and set off anew.
The Mr Universe competition for the year Umpteen AD was due to be held in Grimwood City. I went there and registered my name. For a week I did battle on the stages of Body Hall.
My rivals were immensely forceful entities, half giant, half vegetable, half cliff, half badly added fraction, half recycled joke, and the ones with roots planted in the stage floor were certainly no pushovers. But I won at the end. Sheer determination on my part.
I stood on the podium and accepted the medal. A disc carved from the heart of a neutron star, it was. Dense.
Only Mr Universe is strong enough to wear it.
And then I hiked back here.
But on the way home, I started thinking about many things. About my domestic situation, about my wife and how terrible she is with that nest of venomous springs on her head. I told her not to get her snakes permed but she didn’t listen. Hot tongs hissed and the serpents hissed back and I bet secrets were shared between them.
The fact I had married a gorgon was my own fault. I had prayed to my author for a ‘gorgeous’ bride and I guess he misheard. Or perhaps he just decided to play a mean joke on me…
I reached the outskirts of my suburb and I was trembling all over and my muscles were rubbing against each other like magnified walnuts, but then the author of the story adjacent to this one groaned loudly. The walls between the tales around here are so thin. Shoddy workmanship. I knew he wanted his spirits lifting again.
So I obliged. I lifted them as high as I could.
Much higher than ever before!
But I was still distracted by my predicament and my anxiety made me clumsy and to my horror I dropped them. I dropped his spirits! And they jarred as they hit the hard ground.
Something broke inside them. And the author hasn’t been right since. He sprawled over into this text, even though it doesn’t belong to him, and made changes. Random alterations.
I believe he’s gone mad, frankly. And that explains why things happen in the new stories he writes that make no sense at all. And not only in his own work, but in the work of any author that he can reach from where he is. The houses in this suburb suddenly turned into beehives. That was the first change I noticed. Not the last.
You see those towers in the distance? They are gigantic flowers. And that low rumble you noticed isn’t traffic but the hum of the occupants of the beehives. Yes, it’s obvious now.
But as for my wife. Ah! Don’t expect her to be a bee. She was always sweeter than that, so sweet indeed that she went over the ultimate edge of sweetness and returned at the bottom, where the sourness and bitterness is extreme, unbearable, even demonic.
And that’s why I’m scared of her.
Listen. It’s your bicycle that can travel between stories. That’s what I asked your author to do. Invent a bicycle that can roll over the margins of texts and enter those written by other writers. You brought it here for me and now I plan to steal it. I’m sorry.
But at least I’ve left this letter in its place, to explain my actions. And if you survive the encounter with my wife, you’ll be able to read it at your leisure. Good luck. And best regards!
The Musulman Muscle Man
Thornton pushed open the unlocked door. He found himself in a hall and at the end of the hall was another door and beyond this door he heard the sound of something creaking oddly.
He preferred orthodox creakings, Thornton did.
But he persisted with his quest.
He reached for the handle, turned it and yanked the second door wide. Before his eyes had time to register the scene beyond, he stepped bravely over the threshold. Then he blinked.
What he saw was remarkable but not evil.
A pyramid of honey jars that reached almost to the high ceiling.
Many different kinds of honey were present here and some jars were positioned upside down; and of these, a few had leaked through their screwtop seals and slow cascades of honey poured down the glass sides of lower jars. It was an endless oozing, primeval and sickly. Runny honey and solid, clear and cloudy, crystalline and smooth.
And there was no doubt this was the wife.
Transformed into a ziggurat of the trapped congealment of bees’
love. An unusual change for a woman!
Even more bizarre for a gorgon, surely?
Floorboards creaked under it.
And it was tall, tall, tall, this sticky structure.
Hundreds of jars, thousands.
So Thornton said the only appropriate thing:
“High honey! I’m home!”
The pyramid of honey jars seemed to sigh. Then it said sternly, “I can see that, but why pick a bungalow?”
“What do you mean?” gasped Thornton.
“You’ve turned into a home, just as you announced, but couldn’t you have chosen to become a castle or a mansion or a manor or even just a big detached house with a garden?”
Thornton staggered to the nearest mirror on the wall. He had changed without any warning into an abode. A vertical bungalow. In the highest window of the house he saw a tiny face with a matted beard, a face that laughed before it squeaked words:
“I am the Smarmy Swami! Welcome to my ashram!”
Thornton blundered his way out.
The Musulman Muscle Man had scarpered.
Thornton picked up his note.
But he typically read the wrong side first.
P.S.
Since I won the Mr Universe competition and became Mr Universe himself, I’ve noticed internal changes too. I’m cooling down. My cells are dying one by one, some turning into black dwarves, others into black holes. I’ve stopped expanding, no matter how much I eat. In fact I think it is likely I’ll start contracting soon and probably I’ll turn into a singularity that will explode and start the entire process again. A universe is like a set of lungs, breathing in, out, in, out.
And each breath is the lifespan of a single creation.