The Adventures of the Imagination of Periphery Stowe

By Josh Wagner

The story of a boy and his hallucinations as they journey into the mind of an old man who is dreaming the world.

In search of a cure for the poison that is slowly killing him, Riggs Bombay, the boy who is not afraid of one single thing, sets off in a lung-shaped airship, his toxic hallucinations in tow. While navigating through physical, mental, and spiritual realms, Riggs discovers a most peculiar book, which drives his quest to the farthest reaches of the universe. There, despite the efforts of power-hungry scoundrels, eccentric philosophers, insatiable spirits, and creepy old men, Riggs must deliver the book into the hands of the one person who wants absolutely nothing to do with it!

This “fairy-tales for adults” begins in a world learning to cope without eternal youth, and ends in the ancient mind of Periphery Stowe himself. Spiritual agencies, intent on keeping death right where it belongs, pursue Riggs and his four lovable hallucinations through space and time as he attempts to deliver Stowe’s old storybook to the ultimate source of this twisted and endearing universe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Josh Wagner
• Release date: Jan 5, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452453606

Josh Wagner

Josh Wagner was born with a hole in his heart, a Ventricular Septal Defect (VSD). He’s fine now. He studied Creative Writing and Lit at the University of Montana, and received his MSc from Edinburgh University in 2019. Though he has worked extensively in comics, film and theatre, prose remains his true and abiding love.The author of four novels and dozens of short stories, Wagner’s work has been described as surreal and fantastic, metafictional and paradoxical, poetic and whimsical. His stories have been published by Cafe Irreal, Not One of Us, Cleaver Magazine, Medulla Review, Lovecraft eZine, and Image Comics. He is facinated by rhizomes, paradoxes, things left unsaid and the ambiguities tucked inside longing and motivation.

Book preview

The Adventures of the Imagination

of Periphery Stowe

dreamed up by

JOSH WAGNER

B u c k w h e a t D r e a m s

Hamilton, Montana

The Adventures of the Imagination of Periphery Stowe

Copyright © 2019 by Josh Wagner

All rights reserved of course, though if you really can’t afford the few dollars to pay for the book, go ahead and read it anyway; life’s too short for DRM. It would be rad if you’d tell other people about this work if you enjoy it, whether you paid or not.

Feel free to take pieces of this book and replicate them online or in print, but please link back to www.joshwagner.xyz. If you want to use more than a few paragraphs, please email [e-mail].

Buckwheat Dreams, LLC.

http://stowe.joshwagner.xyz

email: [e-mail]

Cover art and illustrations by Freedom Drudge

Publisher’s Cataloging-in Publication Data

Wagner, Josh

The Adventures of the Imagination of Periphery Stowe /

Josh Wagner. -- 4th ed. -- 20th Anniversary Edition

Missoula, MT :

Impossible Clock Productions, 2019, 2015, 2010, 2008

BAM Publications, 2004

p. ; cm.

ISBN: 978-1-4524536–0-6

1. Fantasy. 2. Slipstream. 3. Metafiction. 4. Whimsy

B u c k w h e a t D r e a m s

Cover

Preface

Prologue

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

PREFACE TO THE 20th ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Twenty years ago I decided to write a book about a world in which the book I was writing was part of that world. This book-within-itself would tell its own story and be essential to its own plot. I had no idea what would happen from there.

I was in India at the time, and I ended up writing most of the first draft in Mumbai while everyone else was asleep. When I got home, the first thing did was try to learn more about the country I’d just spent six weeks wandering around in. At the time, I knew little to nothing about Hindu mythology, so I started there. Among my first discoveries were uncanny similarities between Periphery Stowe’s story and the popular tales of Vishnu. Here was a god sleeping and dreaming the world. Within his dream he would manifest as another form—the form of an avatar or hero destined to rescue reality from itself. These very same layers and loops occur inside the parallel and overlapping adventures of Periphery Stowe and Riggs Bombay.

Had the narrative fabric of India somehow come up through the earth to wriggle into my subconscious? Had my desire to create a story which would so unabashedly fold in on itself somehow attracted a tangled connection between my life and the mythologies of my environment? Were these just the egotistical, mystified ravings of a foolish author?

Either way, it’s been twenty years and I still hold Stowe’s story and the story of its emergence dear to my heart. I hope the little fellow finds his way into yours.

Finally, I want to quickly thank Brad Wilson and Freedom Drudge who have been a part of this project from the very beginning. Brad recently converted Stowe into a screenplay, and I have to acknowledge snatching up a few of his more brilliant lines of dialogue and working them back into the book.

In Loving Memory

of

Alexis Wagner

and

Joshua Cudinski

A student once asked, ‘If I have nothing in my mind,

what shall I do?’

The teacher replied: ‘Throw it out.’

‘But if I have nothing, how can I throw it out?’

continued the questioner.

‘Well,’ said the teacher, ‘then carry it out.’

—Zen Koan

—Dirigibles rising from India ink—‘Back! Back!’

death weakness—His hand moved toward

the apomorphine spray—numb—paralyzed—

couldn’t reach—out of body through a whirling

black funnel—back at the controls now

the needle sharp in the middle.

—William S. Burroughs

The Adventures

of the

the Imagination

of

Periphery Stowe

P R O L O G U E

UNDER THE GOWN of an inkblot sky as round and purple as one eye to the other, lay a small wooded valley.

In the middle of this valley, the sleepy village of Mountown sank into the soft grassy soil like a stone in the snow.

In the middle of this village stood the laboratory of Doctor Prova Rogue, where old Periphery Stowe lay stretched out on the middle of a flat wooden table. Somewhere in the middle of Mister Stowe, the shell of the secret of everlasting life coiled around an idea just outlandish enough to change the world forever.

It was from the middle of all these middles that the script of the story of the whole entire world was kidnapped by meddling villains. It was in pursuit of this that the fearless young Riggs Bombay first embarked to reclaim the script and save the day. And he would do so, more or less, from the same humble patch of earth where, ahem, once upon a time Mister Periphery Stowe made the good doctor a very strange proposal…

ETERNAL LIFE, were the first words Doctor Rogue heard (or thought she heard) that morning on her way past Otto von Otto’s cobbler factory.

She’d been up before dawn, revising a few crucial notes regarding her latest procedure, walking the whole time along a thinning border between forest and meadow where foothills roll tree roots into a stream of the great gathering mountain smoke. Doctor Rogue preferred to walk while she worked, claiming it invigorated the blood and startled the mind. Now, on her way home, she cradled her burden of notes in both arms like some unruly paper infant crawling over her shoulder. One by one, a whirl of pen-peppered pages leapt off the top of the stack and into the breeze, stirring up and down the waves of the world.

Hearing these words—eternal life—Rogue stopped and turned to face the men in their lazy circle out in front of the cobbler factory. She caught the eye of Otto von Otto and asked him to repeat himself.

Eh? was all the fat cobbler could muster to reply.

Otto’s factory wasn’t much of a factory, though that’s what the boys liked to call it. Every once in a while they slung shoes, but mostly they slung dice and gossip.

Rogue shoved her wrinkled squint up into Otto’s sagging, baffled face.

I heard you say something about eternal life. Say it again.

That’s not what I said. I called you a mad old wife.

The cobbler’s crew backed Otto up with the rigorous evidence of incessant knee slapping.

Rogue ignored them.

And before that, she went on, I distinctly heard you say: ‘You did it, Bombay!’

What’s a Bombay?

You tell me. You’re the one who said it.

That’s not what I said at all, Otto huffed. I said, They’re getting away! They’re getting away, you mad old wife! Your papers. Look!

But Rogue did not look. She scratched her head. Had she really misheard? She was getting up in years, and all her bits and pieces weren’t quite as sharply tuned as they once were.

Such a powerful a little tramp, the imagination, the old doctor mused.

Then she harrumphed for good measure, regarded Otto and the boys with a sneer, and continued on.

Silly old Doctor Rogue, Otto concluded.

Silly and old Doctor Rogue may well have been, but she was also soon-to-be-famous, and soon she would not seem quite so silly as before.

It was a chilly spring dawn, a bit more damp than spring’s usual. Most of the meadow birds were sleeping in, while others huddled together and sang to themselves. Mountown was the only village for miles around, nestled into a remote valley at the heart of a rocky range of mountain peaks which extended unchartingly east but flattened out west to the plains and the cities and the sea.

Rogue continued on another quarter mile until she arrived at her small laboratory near the end of the glade on the outskirts of town. Upon reaching her front door, she tucked the remaining bundle of papers under an arm, tacked up a familiar Don’t bug me! sign over a frosted glass window, and crept inside. Crouching down by a small fire, Rogue then set about vanquishing the knots in her silver brush of hair. She could not keep her mind still. Her eyes drifted over to a bottle of blue potion that she suspected would either transform a frog into a watermelon or blow up her entire lab. On a small wooden table next to the window, a pair of double-lensed eyes thrust against the glass lid of a jar, wondering if their fate had anything to do with the strange way the world looked through so many layers of lenses.

What I should do, Rogue thought, is try it first on a carrot.

To the salvation of the frog, the carrot, the lab, or all three, there came a knock at the door. Rogue shouted that it was open and in strolled Mister Periphery Stowe.

What a surprise, Rogue smiled. I thought we were meeting on Wednesday.

Mister Stowe removed his top hat and stood near the fire.

Well, my dear, yes, but ah. I’ve had a... well, you see...

Stowe’s voice trailed off and his gaze drifted about the room.

Please have a seat, Rogue said. She offered her chair and began looking for somewhere to lean.

Periphery Stowe, entrepreneur, bachelor and philanthropist, locally acclaimed for cleverness with money (as well as a few other things), was the most distinguishably-dressed man under four feet tall anywhere from Mountown to the Western Sea. Like the doctor, Mister Stowe was also soon-to-be-famous, but even before he became a household name, most people could recognize Stowe from a distance. Every day he wore high on his pomegranate-shaped skull a silver top hat crowned with a bright green peacock feather streaming from its band. Hat and feather combined made Stowe a full eight or nine inches taller than he would otherwise have been, depending on the stiffness of the feather. He wore waistcoats of purple and red, swirling around a tilt of bright yellow and orange breast buttons.

Though he was getting on in years, relying on a wooden cane to force forward the bend in his back, his lips remained plump and his eyes ever young.

But today Rogue noted a change. Mister Periphery Stowe was breathing more rapidly than usual, and his brow glistened with beads of sweat.

You’re pale, the doctor said. Are you feeling all right?

Just anxious, Stowe said. Thinking a lot. About things.

Things. Yes...?

Not sleeping well. At all. And, ah...

What’s the matter, Stowe? I’ve never seen you like this. Why aren’t you sleeping?

I try, but my eyes keep opening as soon as I nod off. Last night I slept for an hour, woke up, and couldn’t sleep again. It’s like my body doesn’t want to let go. Like it’s afraid to.

And...? Rogue continued to prod.

Struggling to concentrate is all, Stowe said. I’m just...

Tell me!

Fine, but I’m not entirely sure. Is it okay to be not-entirely-sure? I was quite sure a few moments ago. I rushed over just now from home with something very important to tell you. Very important and very, very sure. But by the time I reached your door I’d already forgotten what it was. Then, softly, as if speaking to himself, he added, Just like my dream.

Your dream?

Periphery Stowe hooked his top hat over one knee and glanced out the window.

It was more of a nightmare, he said. And it was the same nightmare I used to have long ago. But the strange thing is, I don’t remember it.

Rogue squinched an eye. "Don’t remember what?"

I know what you’re thinking, and, well, that’s the strangest part. I don’t remember the nightmare’s contents, and I don’t remember the moment I woke up either. All I recall is finding myself upright in bed, blinking at the morning light and thinking, ‘Why, that’s the same nightmare I had as a boy!’ But it was already gone. Leaving me with nothing to do but sit there wondering how silly I must look muttering about a recurring dream I can’t remember.

Rogue reached out and placed a hand on Stowe’s arm. You have been anxious, haven’t you?

But with the nightmare came a thought, he added with excitement.

The thought you forgot?

"Yes and no. Since you weren’t here when I arrived, I decided to go out and sit by the stream to watch the sunrise. I leaned back against the old oak and I guess I drifted off for another little snooze. But this time when I awoke…this time I remembered it all!"

Go on...

I’ve had an idea, you see, said Stowe. A notion, if you will . . . A concept.

A concept?

Regarding our weekly discussions. It suddenly dawned on me what we have to do.

From his waistcoat pocket, Periphery Stowe produced a small scrap of paper and offered it to his friend.

I’ve sketched it all here, just as it occurred to me. I’m not exactly sure what it means, but… well, you be the judge.

As Doctor Rogue scanned the hastily-scrawled diagram her eyes began to widen. She could feel a delicious warmth radiate along the length of her arms and into her shoulders, and much of what she’d been puzzling over the past several years suddenly seemed to snap together in her mind.

This is it, she said through trembling lips. You’ve cracked it.

ONE YEAR to the day from this conversation, Periphery Stowe again knocked on Doctor Rogue’s door. She let him in without a word, and brought him downstairs into a room where she had spent many of the previous months constructing an elaborate machine dedicated to the manifestation of Stowe’s idea. The space was illuminated by only a few dying candles. As Rogue calibrated dials, mixed chemicals, and warmed up her network of coils, fibers, transministers, and countless other mad science contraptions scattered about, Mister Stowe struggled to hoist himself onto a flat wooden table.

I’m afraid I’m a bit anxious, said Stowe, and a little nervous. Fidgety, as well! I can’t sit still. Got the old man twitches. Headaches. Perhaps a pinch of panic.

Just lie back and try to relax. There’s nothing to worry about. This will work, and when we’re through you’ll be a young man once again.

I don’t doubt it, Prova. And I don’t doubt the Process either. In my mind I have nothing but confidence in your abilities . . . it’s just, these doubts come from the gut—and there’s no consoling one’s gut.

We’ll make that our next invention, Rogue smiled.

"I have absolute confidence, however, Stowe went on, that you will succeed in renewing my body and bringing my soul back from wherever you have found to hide it."

Periphery Stowe’s eyes darted around the room in time with his words. He met the doctor’s gaze and lowered his voice.

"Where have you found to hide it?"

Doctor Rogue’s grin became downright mischievous. She unlatched the lid to a gold strong box, whose clasp buckled and walls collapsed to reveal a small brass pedestal. The sun was just coming up over the sill of the window, sending a shelf of light across the doctor’s knotted back as she hunched over the contents. When she swiveled back around she held aloft an olive-shaped stone, whose fiery-orange hue redistributed ambient light like flames of sunset over a faceted sea.

Semi-Liquid crystal, said Rogue. Contained within an elastic membrane, and submerged in an electrostatic gel that keeps the crystal in a consistent frame of fluctuation between liquid and solid states. This, Mister Stowe, will become your living memory.

Rogue tapped the rock roughly with her fingernail, adding: And tough as nails on the outside.

The display seemed to make Stowe forget his troubles. He snapped his fingers with excitement, though they did not snap so much as slip, wrinkles snagging on wrinkles. His face drew near to the crystal and he could see his own left eye reflected off the outer shell.

I’ll be inside there?

Your memories will. Your essence. Or soul if you like.

Rogue set the stone back in place.

Using the output from your Process, we will imprint onto this stone every last pattern and image of your mind—everything that makes you who you are—encoding them into the atomic structure of the crystal. In the final phase we will return the entire complex back to your brain, refined and renewed. Both soul and body will be reborn.

Fascinating!

It was your idea.

Stowe grinned. Well, it was a good one.

Doctor Rogue then produced a long blue needle from the pocket of her jacket, and gently pressed its tip against the inside crook of Stowe’s elbow.

This should help with the nerves, she said. Just the tiniest pin prick. That’s it.

A fleeting wrinkle of pain drained from Stowe’s forehead.

That’s it?

That’s it for needles, Rogue said. You’ll start to feel woozy in a few moments . . . Now, last time we spoke I mentioned the need to stimulate as many subsegments of your brain as possible during the transmission of your essence into the stone. I’ll need to take your mind back as far as we can. Back to the beginning if we can manage it.

The beginning? In the beginning I was standing in line...

Good, Rogue continued, and I’d asked you to bring something to entice your imagination A favorite book, perhaps?

In fact, Mister Stowe had brought with him an old leather-bound storybook. Its cover peeked out of a purple satchel slack on a stool at the far end of the room. Stowe’s eyes were already drooping, but he managed to point it out.

Should be just the thing, he said. My mother used to read it to me . . . always put me . . . right to sleep...

Rogue retrieved the book. On her way back to Stowe’s side she fiddled with a long tube running from the needle in his arm to a bottle-green pipe coiling up into a high silver funnel. A spigot fed into the funnel from the side of a grunting machine. Through this contraption, a steady drip had begun smuggling into Stowe’s knuckleball veins. Rogue sat down, swung the cover of the book wide and flipped to the first page.

"The Adventures of the Imagination... she read. Chapter One . . . ‘Once upon a time, in a very very small world, there lived a boy who wasn’t afraid of one single thing. This is the story of how the world tried to make him afraid, and how everything, which had a habit of getting hopelessly lost and fouled-up as far as anyone could remember, was finally saved in the end...’ Sounds like a gem. Are you comfortable?"

No, actually, said Mister Stowe. I’ve got a sort of sharp pain in my stomach.

Just breathe normally, the doctor said. You may be experiencing sensory hallucinations. Try to remember, it’s all in your mind.

My mind... muttered Periphery Stowe.

His eyes fluttered shut. The machine kept up its work, and the chemical groan of invention began to chuckle.

Part One

Gravity

RisinG

Fear has many eyes and can see things underground.

— Miguel De Cervantes; Don Quixote

C H A P T E R I

T h e B o y W h o W a s n’ t A f r a i d

o f O n e S i n g l e T h i n g

ONCE UPON A TIME, in a very, very small world, there lived a boy who wasn’t afraid of one single thing.

This is the story of how the world tried to make him afraid, and how everything, which had a habit of getting hopelessly lost and fouled-up as far as anyone could remember, was finally saved in the end.

The boy’s name was Riggs Gravitillo, and when people said he was not afraid of one single thing, they were not exaggerating. He was not afraid of the dark, or heights, or water, or loud noises, or insects, or animals, or indeed, of anything! Even as an infant Riggs’ tearless, unshrinking eyes took life on with a wink and a shrug, as if all the dangers of the world were one enormous bluff.

He is like wildgrass, the villagers said of him. He grows where he will. He simply is. There are no reasons for the things Riggs does; he simply does them. The fears and forces that drive the rest of us have no hold on him.

Riggs’ hair was the color of ocean sand at sunset. His eyes were bright and green and his eyelashes long. His lips were pale and thin. He was a very strange boy in a very,