The Shuffle

By Richard Blandford

A unique story collection which takes the reader deep into the heart of the Shuffle – and traps them there.

Inside the Shuffle the Devil lives in the roofs of terraced houses, the art world finds Picasso's lost colouring book and a contagious virus causes everyone to talk with the voice of Tom Baker. Inside the Shuffle there's a Facebook-style afterlife, the hardest jigsaw in the world and the disappointing return of Christ. Inside the Shuffle sex and death, food and love, art and life are jumbled and reimagined. There is no way out of the Shuffle.

Contains the acclaimed short story 'The Man Who Drew the Brook'.

'One of those wonderfully complete stories that seems to cram a whole novel into a short space. *****'
Scott Pack

'Terrific... a timeless quality.'
John Self

'Beautifully done.'
Charles Lambert

'Haunting stuff.'  
Chris Wakling

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spencer Macleavy Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201443856

Book preview

Copyright

Copyright © 2012 Richard Blandford

First published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by The Big Hand Press

The moral right of Richard Blandford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

'The Man Who Drew the Brook' originally appeared in Short Fiction 6, University of Plymouth, 2012.

'Afterlife Proposal no. 1: This Beautiful Death' originally appeared in Paraphilia Magazine: Tagada, 2012.

'The Church of Shellac and Vinyl' originally appeared in La Musica è il Mio Radar, ed. Massimiliano Nuzzolo, Mursia, 2010.

'The Koshino Animation Company of Japan' originally appeared in Love Hotel City, ed. Andrew Stevens, Future Fiction, 2009.

THE PROFESSOR

I called out to the Professor but he did not hear, and as he went to cross the road he seemed unaware of the double-decker that so nearly winged him. When he stepped onto the pavement I could see that he was not himself. He looked distracted, pained.

I placed myself in front of the Professor and waved; he nearly passed me but I caught his eye just in time. Turning, he smiled and offered his hand.

‘Ah, my dear friend, how good to see you!’ he cried, too loud, even, for the bustling high street. The Professor’s voice carried the story of his life within its layers of acquired accents. A thin sediment of California covering a thicker French crust that itself sat upon a core of what? Polish? German? The Professor’s earliest years were a mystery of wartime migration to which he had never cared to provide any clear solution, his unusual name offering little clue. The Hitler Youth was a whispered secret that had followed him throughout his career.

‘I’m fine, thank you,’ I replied. ‘I’m glad I caught you actually, because I was meaning to ask—’

The Professor paused me with a raised hand. ‘Wait a minute please, I just have to—’ He fumbled in the pocket of his winter coat. ‘Ah, that’s it, no wait a minute... Ah, yes, that’s it!’

‘Yes, well, I’m glad I bumped into you because—’

‘You must forgive me,’ interrupted the Professor. ‘I have this new gadget in my pocket which I am still getting used to. It is making me a little disoriented!’ He laughed.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘It is one of these new, what do you call them, M, 3... E players? No, that is not right...’

‘MP3 players,’ I corrected.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. I could see now that poking out from under his scarf was a wire that led to a pair of headphones, lodged in his elderly ears, hairs escaping out from behind them.

The Professor retrieved the player from his pocket. Smooth and rounded like a pebble, its LCD screen declared ‘RANDOM PLAY’ in flashing letters.

‘I never thought that you’d join the digital revolution,’ I said. It seemed such a funny thing for an aging academic to want to buy, back then, when the product had not long been on the market. But then, I was forgetting the Professor’s specialised area of research.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I need it to understand the Dome. Oh, excuse me...’ Harsh-sounding music was again pouring out of the pebble. He fumbled with his headphones, getting them entangled with his scarf, while the pebble went spinning out of his hand, dangling from his coat pocket by the wire and swinging against his leg.

***

The Dome. Of course. The Dome was the theory that had made the Professor’s name back in the seventies. In his seminal text, The Electric Sky, the Professor proposed that in our compulsion to create and transmit replicas of ourselves through technology such as photography, television, telephones and the like, we had inadvertently created a metaphorical prison around each of us – a dome, onto which our electronic replica ‘selves’ were projected. Just as others could now only see the real ‘us’ but dimly, if at all, through the barrier of our projected representations, so our comprehension of others and the world around us was filtered through the images of ourselves we perceived within the Dome. The Dome not only controlled how we were seen, but also how we saw and, therefore, how we acted.

The theory was derided by many as being an absurd and imprecise fantasy that had little to offer in regards to any sensible analysis of the world, but for some, especially younger academics and art students, who saw poetry and beauty in the theory’s many contradictions, it was compelling. It was, for a time, hugely influential: a key text of post-modernity, its ripples felt in art, architecture, design and fashion, film and pop music. The Professor became something of a celebrity in France, appearing often on talk shows to discuss how ‘Dome Theory’ could be used to understand the latest political scandal and entertainment news from Hollywood.

As technology progressed throughout the seventies and eighties, the Professor updated his theory in subsequent volumes Fax Machine Communion and The Polaroid Soul. And then, save for the chat show appearances, there was silence. A long-awaited fourth volume that was rumoured to deal with the communications explosion of the past decade – particularly the Internet, which was seen by some as the absolute vindication of the Professor’s ideas – had been scheduled for publication two years before I first met the man. It had yet to appear.

This was at least in part due to the fact that in between the announcement of the publication date and our meeting, the Professor had run into a spot of bother. Long ensconced in the Sorbonne, where he had sat out both the Summer of Love and the riots of ’68 – disapproving of the former because of the hippies’ lack of a coherent Marxist critique of capitalism, and paradoxically also of the latter due to the rioters’ possession of one – he had by the late nineties accepted a post at a mega-university on the West Coast of the USA where, in exchange for the very occasional tutorial for post-grad students, he would be given the time and resources to research, develop and revamp Dome Theory for the post-post modern, post-theory and soon-to-be post-Millennial age.

Five years passed. The Professor published the odd ‘teaser’ article for his new work in journals, but they revealed little, and its actual content remained unconfirmed. But then, along with the tentative date of publication, a title, The Electric Sky Has Fallen, was announced. There was an instant buzz in the intellectual press. An instant, but cautious buzz. Was the Professor still relevant, they asked? Would his new work define the contemporary moment, or merely be a sad repetition of ideas designed to analyse a far more technologically primitive world? Commentators could not quite decide as to whether they should be excited or not.

The Professor was reportedly nearly ready to submit his finished manuscript to the publisher. Only some footnotes, the first time he had ever used them (and perhaps an indication of an uncharacteristic rigour with which the Professor was rumoured to have approached this definitive, probably final, volume), had to be checked. And it was his actions in regards to the post-grad student that was assigned to him in order to help with this task that ensured the project’s indefinite suspension.

First it was emails. Then it was texts. Then it was photo messages of himself. Naked. Erect. Smiling. Upon being presented with the said image, the Board of Governors immediately demanded the Professor’s resignation, or else face dismissal and possible criminal charges. The Professor refused to go, and attempted to use Dome Theory to escape penalisation, claiming that as the research assistant had only been distressed by an electronic representation of himself, then it was this, and not he – who, in any case, thanks to the images’ influence, was no longer fully in control of his actions – that was at fault.

The Board had no time for Dome Theory now, despite previously having thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars into researching it, and the Professor was let go, along with the book which was to have been published by the university’s own press. Fleeing the US and the growing possibility of prosecution, the Professor found that there was little room for him back in the university cloisters of Europe. The very concept of post-modernism had quietly exited theoretical discourse in the years he had been working on his great text over in the USA. Although he had never used the term himself, he was irrevocably associated with it. The hard fact was that he was a man out of time, and it seemed that it had been decided in his absence that nobody wanted him, his theory, or his book.

So he ended up here, in this small town with its little university that was once a polytechnic. There was little intellectual companionship for him in these parts: just me and a few others. His students did not appreciate or often even know who he was, and his fellow members of staff did not respect him. Indeed, for some, he was the father figure that they had slain in their own intellectual journey while writing their doctoral theses. The Professor would have been better off retiring, and in fact his post at the university was essentially honorary. Nevertheless, it meant that the book, his last great book, would finally come out, as the first publication of the university’s new press.

I would see him often in the high street, on the way to the university or the bookshop where we, the town’s self-proclaimed intellectual elite, would spend many an afternoon, creasing the spines of books we would one day surely buy. And there, on that winter day, the Professor fiddled with the MP3 pebble in his gloved hand and finally managed to stop suspiciously modern-sounding music pumping out of it.

***

‘So what have MP3 players got to do with the Dome?’ I asked him.

‘Everything, my friend, everything! They are the latest form of invasion on each of our individual identities from the Dome itself. No longer content to dictate to us through our means of self-representation, the Dome now controls us through our leisure devices, such as this MP, ah...’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Here, let me show you.’ The Professor thrust the pebble into my hand. ‘You see what it says here: RANDOM PLAY. Now, when these players were first put on the market, they were surely intended so that a person controlled entirely what music they wished to listen to whilst mobile, yes? You would put the music in your computer, pick one piece off of one CD, two or three off another. And then you could decide in what order precisely you wanted to hear them. But look what happened. Nobody had the time to programme an order for all those hours of music. Instead, they asked their computer to select a whole load of pieces at random from a big list of all the music they liked or might like if they ever had time to listen to it. And that is not all. The Dome must have worked some of its little evil magic in the design stages, because these devices have this button, RANDOM PLAY. The pieces of music that have already been selected at random by the computer are thereby further randomised, and instead of having complete control as intended, the listener gives it up not once, but twice: first to the computer, and then to this device.

‘We have become slaves, but not to a greater will, but to no will at all. We are in the thrall of pure random sequences, generated by computer programmes. Cause and effect is over. Meaning has ended. It is the Dome, in a new form: the Net! Not just the Internet, although that is part of it, of course. But why did we not realise, that when you find yourself under a net, you are not linked, but trapped! And this wider Net that was once the Dome has trapped us: controlling our taste, our moods – everything that makes us ‘us’! Enslaving us to a purely arbitrary existence! The new world order is random order. We will all be caught in the Shuffle. No more choice, no more discernment, no more morality. No more right and no more wrong. And it all begins with this little pebble...’

‘But surely it is the listener’s choice to give up control,’ I interjected. ‘Nobody is made to do that. I doubt many people even use them like that. Nobody even has to own one.’

‘Oh, they do,’ said the Professor, proceeding to neatly ignore my first point, as was his way, ‘it is a biological imperative. For what young person will find a mate and pass on their genes if they are seen now with an old-fashioned CD player strapped to them? The Dome is clever. It knows that when it comes to sex all free will is an illusion.’

Although I thought that the Professor’s argument was certainly interesting, it struck me as being as intellectually dubious as his earlier writings. The rumours of the sharpening of his methodology were clearly unfounded. Not only that, I found myself troubled by the thought of looking for conspiracy theories in an MP3 player now that the world had experienced events such as 9/11 and Iraq. No doubt if I had thought to ask him, the Professor would have told me how he saw them to be connected. Yet, in a way, that seemed worse. Ideas that felt radical and subversive when conceived in a Cold War thaw now left a sour taste in the mouth. The forces of evil had revealed themselves to be real people, operating through armies, governments, terrorist cells and multinationals. To pretend that evil was an invisible current that flowed through the design process of MP3 players was quaint, silly – decadent, even.

He went on talking, there on the high street on that day, in the cold. He explained how multi-channel digital televisions meant that nobody now ever watched the programme they had intended to watch when they sat down, and the internet was a complex but failsafe system for hiding all information from whoever was looking for it. How global warming was subconsciously willed into existence by the patrons of tanning salons. I never did get round to asking him about the thing I had wanted to when I stopped him.

‘Well, my friend,’ he said, finally, ‘now I must leave you. There are many, many things I must think about. I have decided my book is not nearly finished, and maybe it will never be, if the Dome keeps up its mischief at this rate! Adieu, my friend.’

He clasped my shoulder in farewell and turned. As he went I could hear that his pebble was playing him the very newest form of urban music, very loudly. How did he get hold of any and why? I knew he liked chamber music, mostly. My only thought was that he must have found some way of selecting it at random from all possible music, no doubt involving a system of his own devising, and the assistance of a female post-graduate student.

***

In The Polaroid Soul, the Professor stated: ‘The only form of defence against the Dome is surrender. Only by submitting ourselves to its every whim, only by riding its newest wave, can we comprehend its evil. And only then can we begin to harbour the hope of breaking free.’

The idea has elegance, even if in today’s political climate it seems a little naïve, even dangerous. Despite this, I like to say it to myself sometimes, when I think of the Professor. For he is no more. He died: killed by the Dome, or was it the Net, as he planned his counter-attack. Stepping out onto the road, music blaring in his ears, I saw him, and I called out, but could not make myself heard, as the double-decker bus returned on its route, and did not stop as he disappeared under its wheels.

NOISE

Kyle, come here now. I said, come here. Come here or there’ll be trouble. Come here now, or you’ll get a smack. I mean it. Kyle, come here now and stop being silly. Kyle, come here, or I’ll hurt you. Right, that’s it. I said, didn’t I? When we get home, I’m going to slam your fingers in the drawer. I mean it. Just do as you’re told, Kyle. Do as you’re told or – right, that’s it. When we get back home, I’m stapling your face. Going to staple your face because you’re being naughty. I don’t care. No, I don’t care. Come here, now, we’re going. Kyle, put that down. No, we’re not getting that, put that down, now. Kyle, put it down or I’ll cut you. I mean it. I’ll cut a hole in you. Kyle. I said – now look what you’ve done. Now look what you’ve done. No, I don’t want to hear it. Say you’re sorry. Say you’re sorry. Say you’re sorry or I’ll glue your eyes shut. I mean it. I’ll glue them. OK, darling, OK. You don’t need to cry. Mummy’s not angry with you anymore. There we go. Now give us a cuddle.

A LITTLE DEATH

One of the many interesting things Melissa said before she dumped me and moved out, going back to university to learn more interesting things of little practical value, was that a French term for ‘orgasm’ is ‘le petit mort’. Literally translates as ‘the little death’. I didn’t understand it when she said it, as up until then I’d found the act of ejaculation to be positively life affirming, but now, after recent events, I know what it means only too well. I wish to God I didn’t.

It all started the week after Melissa packed up and left. The flat was quite bare now, with only my things in it, and quite lonely too. Of course, I knew she’d go eventually, long before she made the announcement. It wasn’t that we lacked commitment; at least, we were both good at creating the appearance of being serious to the outside world. It’s just that whenever we discussed the future, regardless of what she said, I knew that she had no intention of seeing it through.

She was a rotten liar, although she did it often. I guess intelligence can make you cold that way. And love can make you spineless, like I was: not believing her but pretending anyway, just in case she’d come to believe her own lies one day. Not only that, but I’d got so wrapped up in her that I had let nearly all my friendships wither and die, even old ones. Now she was gone, all I had when I came home from work was a half-empty flat, a television, a pile of washing-up, some wine, and masturbation.

Yes, masturbation. The irresistible habit that manages to simultaneously console and mock the lonely bachelor in the very moment they engage in it. You might think its lingering after-effect of emptiness and self-hatred would put anyone off ever trying it more than once, but soon enough you can feel its inevitable approach, and you know that soon you will be answering its siren call with the palm of your spittled hand.

I was answering it nearly every night, all the easier now with the internet transforming my home computer into an electronic version of the dirty shops I’d never had the courage to enter in my younger years: featuring a bigger selection of products than one shop could ever stock, and no risk of anybody seeing you enter or leave. The ease, convenience and anonymity of it all were nearly enough to assuage the guilt. Nearly enough, mind you.

After a week of this self-abuse, my body was beginning to tire. Nevertheless, the compulsion carried me through until, on that first lonely, silent Saturday night, I found myself caressing a member that just refused to maintain rigidity, let alone produce an outpouring of semen. It was a fight between the limits of the flesh and the desires of the mind, and however tightly I clenched, or however much I lubricated, it would not abandon its flaccid retreat. The flesh had won, it seemed. Sadly, I wiped my palm and looked for my pants.

And then the noise started. A moaning. Unmistakable. The moan of a woman. Foreplay. Voices. A woman and a man, talking quietly, too quiet for me to hear what they were saying, but the woman’s voice was eager, directing the man over her body. It was obvious. She moaned again, then once more, rising in pitch. Now rhythmically. He must be inside her. I could hear the creak of a mattress spring, synchronised with the sound of the woman. And now I could also hear the man, low, quieter, but there.

Moans became grunts. Her grunts became shrieks. I looked down. My exhausted soldier had found its strength and stood proud. Furiously I leapt to action, two of my down-strokes to one of their thrusts. The shrieking became yelping before lowering for a moment back to a moan. Then it began to build. She was about to come, I knew. And as she did, and he did, so did I.

Little did they know that they had just had a threesome with their new next-door neighbour. Until that moment, I had not realised anyone had moved in. The flat on that side had been empty as long as I had lived there.

***

It was Sunday morning. I lay in bed, strangely at peace. For some reason, the despair brought on by my excessive masturbation no longer afflicted me. In fact, memories of the night before filled me only with delight. Rather than feeling ashamed of my invasion of their personal moment, I felt happy to have been included, albeit unknown to them.

And then I heard them again. It was less than eight hours later, but they had more than enough energy to go through it all again, harder, louder, faster, longer. And again, I reached inside the bedclothes and joined them.

There was a further engagement between the three of us at quarter past five that day, then again, six o’clock the following morning. But when I heard their sudden grunting coming from a part of their flat that could only have been their kitchen at half-six that evening, shortly after I came home from work, I had to admit defeat. I could not keep up with them. They were simply having more sex than I was physically capable of engaging in, even at one remove.

The next evening I was back on track, however. As I had done on the previous occasions, I imagined what they looked like and precisely what they were doing. I liked to think they were young and attractive, of course, although their physical qualities changed continuously in my mind. As to positions, the laws of biology and physics did not apply to this invisible couple. They could bend round each other as if, rather than a skeleton, they merely had a wire inside them, like pipe-cleaner figures. Now I was thinking of them up against a wall, her body miraculously spinning round without interruption, wrapping her legs round his torso. He was an olive-skinned man from the Mediterranean, although he never gained more than a vague form in my mind; she with the air of the Pacific, her hair black and long, her brown nipples peeking out between the strands.

It was a particularly intense session that night. Like the night before, there had been no foreplay, just the brutal outburst from a sudden penetration. The cries were louder, as if, it seemed, she was gasping for breath. He too, was crying out. It made me all the more excited. I was worried, in fact, that I would not be able to hold on for them and come too soon. Somehow I thought that they would be disappointed.

I