The Bielefeld Chronicle

By Archibald Grey

Have you ever heard of Bielefeld?

Have you ever been to Bielefeld?

Have you ever met anybody who has?

Jacob Młnarczyk is an aimless drifter, who quits his dead-end supermarket job and embarks on a journey to Bielefeld, a city that doesn't exist.

Along the way, Jacob wanders through strange worlds both real and imaginary. Beset by hallucinations and anxiety attacks, he discovers that there are some things in this world actually worth giving a shit about.

A mystical trek through dreams, drugs, and alien worlds, The Bielefeld Chronicle is a surreal, tongue-in-cheek love letter to the social science fiction of Delany, Heinlein, and LeGuinn.

Inspired by the psychedelic and psychological science fiction of the 1960's and '70's, the Bielefeld Chronicle is a surreal encounter with life, death, love, and betrayal — one that combines elements of magical realism and science fiction to create a fantastical, allegorical journey into the mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hubris Books
• Release date: May 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798201828127

Archibald Grey

Archibald Grey is the reasonably well selling author of the novels Muriel and The Inheritance, and the story collection The Crashing Tide. He has had his short stories rejected by many of the most prestigious conventional and science fiction publications in both print and digital, and he is noted for having won no awards. Archibald lives in Semolina, Canada and has no pets or children.

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This book and its cover are licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Copyright © 2021 by Archibald Grey

The Bielefeld Chronicle

Based on real events.

Earth

In which a universe begins.

Time began that morning at 8am, under the yellow and red sign of a chain store supermarket in the neighbourhood of Herrenhausen, Hannover, Germany. Unbeknownst to anyone, even to Jacob himself, the moment he had just witnessed, the turning of a key and the opening of a lock on a front door, was the beginning of a universe.

The key turned, the doors opened, the lights came on, and this particular universe began. Jacob followed Meliha as she trudged up the aisle past the dairy fridges, whose black curtains were ascending with an ominous whirring hum; past the low-standing freezers with sliding plexiglass lids, full of frozen fish and chicken and thin-crust pizza for the diet conscious; past the shelves packed with a bewildering array of food-like flavour-substances which had been mechanically extruded into an equally bewildering multitude of jars and tins and packets. Finally, they pushed in through a door at the back of the store marked:

Employees Only

The door squeaked.

Their shoes squeaked.

On the wall in the dishevelled break-room were taped the schedule and various rules and health and safety notices, which Meliha ignored while she stuffed her bag into a locker and locked it. And while Jacob was still extricating himself from his own accoutrements, she turned to the pasted up notices.

That’s the schedule, she said, you’ll figure it out eventually. And those are the rules. Read them. They’re not complicated and you’re smart enough.

Behind them the door squeaked open, and a short young man with a long face came in. He offered no greeting, The new guy?

Meliha gestured with her head, That’s Erdem. He’s on restocking today. You’ll learn that eventually.

She went into the office and returned with a red polo shirt. It had yellow trim on the collar and Neat-O Supermarket printed on the breast-pocket in the same vivid yellow. She handed it to Jacob, Put this on.

When he had done so, she looked at him, nodded, and said, Come on.

In which that which is missing is found.

She took him on a tour of the not-quite-endless plethora of stuff for people to buy. Margarine and mayonnaise and olive oil. Flour and spices and sugar, cans of beans and jars of pickles or sauerkraut. Plastic bags full of rice, or pasta. Condiments and sauces of every imaginable kind, chocolate and marshmallows and candy and chips and beer and fizzy drinks, and a small corner of fruit and vegetables. An entire universe of brightly coloured packaging for which Jacob had just become, in a sense, god. He was, in time, to become its guiding hand: keeping it in order, replenishing stocks, disposing of expired goods.

Meliha – dark-featured, straight, black hair tied into a loose ponytail – watched him with a probing look on her face, Tell me, what do you see in front of us?

Jacob hesitated. They stood in the middle aisle, surrounded by shelves full of small jars and packets, inexpensive soup mixes and cheap powdered sauces, tins of meat and potato stew, tall cans packed with long sausages, pickled vegetables and mushrooms squished into cylinders of glass.

Shelves? He tried.

Wrong.

He tried again, Sauerkraut?

Wrong.

He looked around, Customers?

She smiled, condescendingly, and shook her head. Her ponytail flipped weightlessly through the air, Wrong!

She stretched out a hand, palm up, the whole little universe resting upon it, Before us you see an embodied concept, an idea brought to life, an honest to god metaphysical truth.

Her eyes sparkled, Jacob felt stupid, Uhm, I don’t think I understand what you mean.

Her gesture widened to encompass the entire universe and all of the people wandering about within it, What do these people want?

Customers milled about, pushing steel-mesh shopping carts, or carried black plastic baskets. A small, white-haired old lady trundled up the aisle towards them, leaned forward, forearms braced on the push-bar of her cart.

Food?

Wrong.

Toilet paper, yogurt, beer?

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

She smiled, Everyone who comes into this store is looking for something, something specific. Each one feels that there is a little hole in his or her heart. They feel, without knowing how or why, that a tiny little piece of themselves is missing. They can’t identify what it is, and they don’t know how to fill this hole. All they know is that they want to fill it. They need to.

And so they come here?

And so they come here.

Jacob looked around, looked inside himself. Something was missing, But what do they actually want?

Her eyes blazed with a mysterious light, and she leaned in and whispered, I don’t know.

Abruptly, she turned and walked away. Jacob heard her parting words reverberate through the store, bouncing off the tins and jars of goulash and sausages, dissolving into the flood of bright white light descending from the ceiling, Nobody knows.

The old lady, who by now had made her way up to where Jacob was standing, paused and reached for something on the shelf. He turned to her. Excuse me ma’am, but do you know what you’re looking for?

Her voice was soft and quiet, and she held a tin of tuna in her hand, she said, I just found it, thank you, and continued on.

Her words struck Jacob in the chest and the blow pushed him back onto his heels. He felt the weight of it overtake him, a hot, heavy feeling of molten lead running down his spine and pooling in his shoes so that he couldn’t move. His thoughts pendulated between two unnameable, unknown, completely contradictory points in the misty infinitude of his mind. The air around him seemed to have frozen. The noises of the store around him coagulated and hung, not sounding, and not not. The entire universe was caught, dangling from the imperceptible point between the end of breathing out and the beginning of breathing in. He stood, the center of a world gone catatonic and felt. Everything all at once was suddenly so real, and yet not.

And then, from nowhere, Erdem was there, next to Jacob, in front of him, his mouth moving as if he were trying to say something, but the sounds were frozen and couldn’t reach Jacob’s ears. He watched as Erdem’s mouth swung up and down, and his eyes fixed on the two rows of crooked teeth. They gnashed, lips wrapping over and back, bulging into kisses, compressing into thin lines, and leaving a gaping hole of fleshy pink and saliva sheen.

Suddenly, Erdem clapped his hands in Jacob’s face, loud and sharp, and the world began again. The old lady, in her own little universe further up the aisle, started up and continued on. The sounds of the store wobbled back to life, and he heard Erdem’s voice, clear, if perhaps thinner than it should have been, Are you ok?

Jacob looked again at the snaggled teeth in this stranger’s mouth, No, I don’t think I am.

Erdem sighed, Whatever. Someone’s knocked over a bottle of washing liquid. Go clean it up.

In which a quest begins.

There was a puddle in the middle aisle up near the front of the store, just behind the cash desks. On the aged, once-white floor tiles, and under the too-bright lighting, the liquid was so green, so thick, and yet so perfectly clear that Jacob’s mind was unable to connect this substance with the thought of cleanliness and hygiene. He hunched down and watched the lethargic tsunami of thick, green stuff as it spread slowly across the floor. Its front edge rolled forward glacially, subsuming the dirt and dust in its path.

One of the endless ranks of drunk old men, who regularly swayed up and down the aisles looking for the shelves with the cheap beer, hove into view and said with a guilty look, It wasn’t me.

By the time Jacob got back with a roll of paper towel, it was an impassable green sea, as wide as the aisle and beginning to slither its way up towards the cash desks. He crouched and began to clean, moving his arm in a wide, slow circle. The goop resisted, and the patch he had cleaned seemed to have made no difference to the dirty discoloration of the floor.

Footsteps approached and a voice made itself heard. A question drifted down to him in crumbling English, whether they had pomegranate juice anywhere in the store. Jacob stood up and apologised, he didn’t know, but probably not.

She was somewhere around fifty and, judging by her strong accent, Spanish. She didn’t wear glasses, though somehow she looked as if she usually did. She gazed at him with an expression, unabashedly direct and with such radiant, self-confident Empathy, that Jacob had to blink and look away. She reached out a hand and laid it on his cheek.

You wear contact lenses?

No, he answered, he didn’t wear them.

But your eyes, they are so… Searching for the word, she took her hand away, They have black outside, but inside they are green. I have never seen such a thing. And without a question mark, You are not German.

He agreed, no, not German, but Canadian.

Ah, from Canada?

She took his hand softly in hers and he felt the age of her skin and the strange, slick texture of moisturizing hand-cream, That is strange, you have special eyes. She grinned. Do you want to know a secret?

Then she smiled, and it was one of those smiles that you see only once, maybe twice in a lifetime; not a simple hefting of the corners of the mouth, but a deep, physical motion, a smile that beamed compassion and understanding, honesty and truth. Jacob felt himself relax, felt how the tension in his shoulders peeled away, and how his own mouth began to creep up into a smile.

He said stupidly, I like secrets.

She looked around to make sure that no one was there to overhear, There is a place. It does not exist. I think you should go there.

What?

She is small, to the west, in Nordrhein Westfahlen. She is called Bielefeld. The woman gave him a dramatic wink and tipped him on the nose with an index finger, In the North of the Bielefeld city there is a stop on the Straßenbahn with the name of Graf-von-Stauffenberg. Wait there. You will see. You will there find what you so long have been looking for.

She turned and walked back down the aisle and disappeared around the corner of a shelf full of cat food. Jacob wanted so to follow her. To run after her. To ask her. To make her tell him… what? Well, anything. Everything. Who was she? Where did she come from? What would he find in Bielefeld? What was he even looking for?

But as he stepped out to make after her, the floor squelched, and then squished under his foot. He looked down to see that the green gloop had spread back down the aisle and encircled his shoes.

In which a connection is made.

Erdem appeared around the other corner and stopped, looking at Jacob in disbelief, You were supposed to clean that up, not play splishy splashy in the puddles. And why are you smiling like that? I think the fumes have gone to your head.

Jacob couldn’t find any words. Something inside him drew his eyes up the ceiling. From the lights, the Spanish woman’s voice drifted down to him out of the near-past, ‘You will there find what you so long have been looking for.’

His eyes fell and fixed themselves on Erdem, filled with the light of truth, I know a secret, he said and smiled wider. Erdem looked at him incredulously, suspiciously, worriedly, I’m sure you do.

The look they shared lasted an eternity, and as Jacob’s smile widened ever wider, Erdem’s own mouth began to twitch. However much he tried to fight it, and however much it seemed to pain him, Erdem’s eyelids opened and the pupils of his eyes expanded, until Erdem’s face was wracked by the happiest expression it had worn in a very long time.

From across the store, Meliha’s voice wafted down out of the fluorescent ether and into the strange, elated silence that stretched between the two young men. It was thin and small, the voice, yet strong, and had a cutting edge to it, in spite of the distance, Jacob! Hey, Jacob!

It faded away, but seemed to hang in the air, murmuring to itself like an irritated stream in a forest of plastic-wrapped paper towel. Their smiles withered, and Erdem waved Jacob away with two flicks of the back of his hand and an expression on his face that seemed to say, ‘go on, go on, you’ll regret it if you don’t.’ Then he gestured to the goo and said, I’ll do this.

Jacob awkwardly wiped the stuff from his shoes, and then walked the horizontal middle aisle that split the store’s long rectangle into two almost-squares.

In which a terrible monster is confronted; disaster strikes.

He scanned up and down the aisles, looking for the short, stocky, Turkish lady, and spotted her at the furthest end of the last row. She stood, right at the back of the store, hands on her hips, tapping her foot, and shaking her head. When she spotted Jacob she beckoned to him impatiently with two flicks of an open, upwards facing hand. Her ponytail slashed a vicious arc as she turned sharply on her heel and pushed through a set of double-hinged swinging doors into the small loading bay and adjacent stockroom.

The space was packed with ranks of carts, each stacked ceiling high with food-type substances and multi-coloured beverages, all in violently bright wrappings, all waiting to replace their comrades who would inevitably fall, either to purchase, or to simple old age. In the adjacent stockroom, hiding behind another large swinging door, was a great machine with a yawning maw full of cardboard boxes.

This, Meliha said, with a horizontal hand-gesture, is the box-crusher. It is very simple to operate. Once the boxes have reached up to this line here, you close the door, at which she yanked up on the horizontal door, which screeched, swung upwards on its bottom-mounted hinges, and slammed shut with an almighty bang.

Jacob felt himself slapped in the face, shot in the chest, and stabbed in both ears with two sharp pencils.

With another pair of screeches, Meliha locked the door into place by heaving the two long levers down on both sides of the door. She then reached up, turned a key which seemed to live permanently in the locking power-switch, put her index finger on the big red ‘Activate’ button, and turned to look Jacob directly in the eye, "This is a powerful machine and it saves us a great deal of work. But for that power, it can be very dangerous. I will say this three times right now, and I hope you are not dumb enough that I ever need to say this again."

Dramatic pause.

"Do not open the door when it is running. Even if you realise that something has fallen in that is valuable, even if it is of immeasurable sentimental value to you, even if you think the machine might break because of it, do not open the door when it is running. Even if your perfectly happy and healthy grandmother has fallen inside and you want to save her from being mercilessly crushed until her insides explode and are subsequently absorbed into the cardboard in whose sandwich she will soon be pressed, do not open the door when it is running. You will lose a hand, or an arm, or it will pull you in and you will be the mystery meat in the cardboard sandwich. And if you are pulled in, you will die, because none of the rest of us is going to risk our own fingernails to save an idiot who was warned three times not to open the door when the machine is running and did it anyway. Understand?"

Technically, that was four times.

Does that mean you understand?

Yes, it does.

Good.

She pushed the button and the machine lowed, then groaned, and then whined, and then thunked, and then whined, and then groaned, and then lowed, and finally stopped, all in a deeply menacing way. Meliha gave Jacob a meaningful look and gestured to the two handles on either side of the machine. Jacob moved forward and flipped them up, screech-banged the door open and peered inside. The pile of boxes that had once been up to his waist was now compressed into a thickness that just about reached the middle of his shins.

Remember what I said, said Meliha, pointing a meaningful finger and then walking away, ponytail flicking warningly behind her.

Jacob, alone in the unfamiliar room, standing before the monstrous machine, gazing into its dark maw, felt fear. His mind filled with imagined images of gnashing teeth flashing in blind, crushing darkness. Unbidden came the impossible image of himself somehow tripping and somehow falling in, somehow closing the screeching door, somehow turning the key, somehow hitting the button. The awful anticipation, surrounded by the thundering sound of powerful pneumatic pistons, waiting for the first cool touch of the metal plate, and then the building pressure that would become pain, that would become agony as his rib-cage buckled, his collar bones snapped, and his skull was crushed. He could feel the pressure inside himself building, the liquids within himself straining at his skin, and then bursting forth in a singular gush of blood and bile and brains. And then the slurping, squelching pop as the crushing plate receded, leaving him literally pooled in the bottom of its mouth, resting on top of its cardboard tongue.

The lights went out.

Jacob screamed. A feeble screech of a scream, but a scream nevertheless. His heart raced, he fumbled towards where he thought he remembered the door to be, stumbled, tripped, fell onto the hard floor, crawled until he banged his head against something not quite as hard as a wall. He lifted himself up, hands shaking, and felt his way through the door into the small loading bay; and there saw a small chink of dim red light through the double doors out into the main store.

The main lights were out here too, but the fire escape lights provided enough illumination to see by. He looked around. Meliha’s voice again wafted, this time from the front of the store, Hey, Jacob, closing time, come on!

Still shaking, heart still racing, panic vibrating his every muscle, sinew, and bone, he hurried over to the lunch room, which was also dark but for fire-escape lights. In the bloody gloom, unable to catch his breath, he fumbled his way to his locker, and hurriedly pulled on his coat and turned on his phone, which pinged loudly, terrifying him deeply. Up at the front of the store, Meliha and Erdem waited with peeved expressions on their faces.

Jacob ducked past them out into the cool, dark, orange-lit night. He waited awkwardly, pacing a short line up and down, waiting for Meliha to finish locking the door. And as soon as she and Erdem said goodnight, he muttered a goodbye without looking either of them in the eye and hurried away.

In which a foe is vanquished.

The tramcar doors opened and he stepped, finally, out of the orange gloom and back into clear light. He reached out to grab a handhold. His hands were shaking uncontrollably and through the residual terror he observed abstractedly as his body shook and shook. He must have looked so pale, so terribly wan, that an old man stood up and offered him a seat. Jacob sat and he shivered, sweating and yet cold. A shivering line of fire ran up from his navel, through his rib-cage and stabbed into his throat as his phone pinged again, and again. Junk-mail and newsletters he had never signed up for, emails full of garish logos, red hearts and kissing lips, the title announced, 81gger P3n15 4 Ur Grl. A swelling current of loneliness swept across his acrid, jangling nerves as, flicking through his inbox, Jacob realised that the only email he ever got was from robots and marketers.

From every direction at once a neutral female voice announced Jacob’s stop, and he dashed out of the tram car as the doors opened, back out into the lamp-lit night. The street was wide and lonely in the sodium-vapour orange of Linden, Hannover, Niedersachsen, Germany.

Shivering in the warm summer evening, he turned and began walking towards his apartment. The light of his phone wrapped him in a halo of blue-tinted radiance. He let the tram pass, then turned and crossed the tracks. Head down in his phone, browsing through a news feed, he lost time for a while and glanced up just in time to avoid a collision with someone coming in the other direction, also on her phone. He put it away. A bit further along he discovered that he had opened a half-finished game of Sudoku. He put it away. Then he remembered that he had been meaning to look up the meaning of the word abhängig, then he remembered that he had just put his phone away and put it away again. Some way down the street, just as he was becoming aware that he was now scrolling through an endless stream of socks with funky colours and patterns, becoming aware that in this he might be using his phone to distract himself from his emotions and the things that made him feel them, he ran head first into a lamppost.

The ground swung up to meet him ungently and his phone landed next to his head with a crack.

There was no one around, and yet Jacob glowed with embarrassment and shame. Shimmering somewhere in behind the shame was a current of anger. Anger that he was embarrassed. Anger that he constantly did this kind of shit to himself. Or let it be done to him. A wave of rage swelled up suddenly and lifted him to his feet. The fucking lamppost. Senselessly he kicked at it and tried to push it over. He punched it, hurt his hand, got more angry at himself, saw the phone and picked it up. That bitch. It was smashed and wouldn’t turn on. Couldn’t she have told him they were leaving? He saw his fractured, streetlamp-lit reflection in the spiderweb of rectangular glass. Couldn’t she have waited till he came out to turn off the lights? He palmed it and pulled his arm back, winding up. The bitch, with her flicky hair and her imperious glare.

Before he even felt it leave his hand the phone had bounced and was skittering across the sidewalk. Queen goddess of a shitty, dirty little store in a shitty, dirty, nowhere neighbourhood.

He rushed over to the phone and picked it up again, then hurled it again. It split into two pieces, the plastic back frizbeeing off into a bush and the body landing next to his foot. Is this what his life had become? A scratching voice filled his head, yes, it said, you are worthless. Your life means nothing. This is where you will die. The rest of your days will be an endless repetition of boredom and drudgery. There is no escape.

Molten rage filled his bones. He stomped and stomped with his heel on the fractured glass of his cracked phone, his broken reflection.

Destruction. To destroy. He grabbed a big stone from a decorative arrangement on the small square of grass in front of the apartment building next to him, and with muscles tensing and sinews straining, he brought it down with all of his might on top of the broken, blind, forlorn, and helpless phone.

Talons of angry flame shot out from underneath, licking up around the edges of the rock, singeing the toes of his shoes. It screamed and squealed, the rock vibrated madly. Jacob smelled the acrid rasp of burning plastic, felt the harsh flames light the lines and curves and surfaces of his anger-taut face and laughed.

When the fire had subsided, he pushed the stone away with his foot and gazed down upon his vanquished oppressor. All that was left was a dark halo of charred concrete and a melted mass of plastic and aluminium at its center. His hands flexed open and closed as he walked. He was vibrating with some uncontrollable energy. Air rushed loudly in and out of his lungs. His eyes searched the street, the facades of the apartment houses, searching for something he knew not what.

The tidal wave of neurotic rage began to subside