The Specific Gravity of Water

By Bob Quinn

The Specific Gravity of Water is a comic fantasy for adults.

Mr. Trout is a misfit teaching creative writing at a minor state college who infringes the right-thinking mores of academe and must go on the run.

He escapes to another country, almost entirely his own invention, called Ishkastan.

There every citizen is considered an artist and paid to do nothing, the novel idea of the country’s president, a lugubrious poet and Nobel Prize winner.

Ishkastan’s only abundant resource is fresh mountain water, the new oil of a polluted and thirsting planet. The result is unimaginable prosperity for the citizens and satisfying profits for the global corporations who run the place.

All menial jobs are done by colour-coded immigrants.

Trout introduces the principle of ‘a stack-up of tolerances’ and catastrophe results.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398468917

Book preview

About the Author

Bob Quinn is a writer, filmmaker and photographer. Born 1935 in Dublin, he has lived in the Galway Gaeltacht for the past fifty years. He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish parliament of artists and is an honorary D.Arts from University College Galway. His books include Smokey Hollow – a fictional memoir, An Tír Aneol – the unknown country – photography; Maverick – A dissident view of broadcasting; The Atlantean Irish – the book of the films; The Accompanist – novel; Darwin on the Shannon – a novel.

For recreation he grows trees and does wood sculpting.

Dedication

To all those who cherish their fantasies.

Copyright Information ©

Bob Quinn 2022

The right of Bob Quinn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398468900 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398468917 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Christine Dwyer Hickey and Marcus Quinn for encouragement.

Part One

One

The way Mr Traut coped with his fear of people was to imagine them with no clothes on.

Early encounters with sadistic babysitters, crèche tyrants, school bullies, clergy in black, aggressive cops, bestial army sergeants taught him this trick. All he had to do was blink his eyes to the rhythm of a quickstep – slow, slow, quick-quick – then concentrate until his persecutors’ garments fell away like leaves in autumn. Potential bullies were thus rendered as harmless as new-born babies or naked emperors. His victims noticed only a slight facial tic. Ultimately the practice developed in Traut a talent for fantasy, writing stories for fatherless children like himself. There was a brief phase when he advocated the mass murder of parents, but his common sense prevailed: it might frighten some children and his aim was always to entertain.

He had shared a tiny flat overlooking the Hudson River with Dolores, his mother, an ex-actress and model whose only friends appeared to be the glamorous ladies of 42nd street. The flat was acquired in her heyday, she told him, a present from an admirer. It was claustrophobic and cheap, now cluttered with unreturned library books. From childhood Traut had been a captive audience of her histrionics while she whined about a world that was cruel and unjust. ‘Life’s a bitch and then you die’ was her mantra. Life was good or bad, black or white depending on her mood but the real enemy was decay; to the bitter end Dolores fought it with layers of pancake makeup embellished with mascara for her good surviving feature, her eyes. She put on a new face every day, sometimes dyed her hair. This chameleon talent was disconcerting for a child who depended on his immediate environment being reliable, unchanging. But he grew as accustomed to his mother as night followed day and as suffocating affection alternated with hysteria. He escaped into books.

In his early days there had been a lot of male visitors she called uncles. When they visited he was sent out to play. Their numbers dwindled with the years. Sometimes his real uncle, her only brother, visited bearing goodies for the child, the most precious one being a magnifying glass. Uncle was also an actor – a little more successful than his sister – as a queen in nightclub revues. Sometimes the man tried on his sister’s clothes. While the child examined the carpet in detail with his new toy the two adults would happily share theatrical gossip, all bitchiness and humour until the uncle left and Dolores would relapse into rage at her brother’s minor achievements, at her bad luck, at the unfairness of life.

She was not unkind to the child; in fact, she cherished him all the more because he was different to other children, had learning difficulties. To protect him from the ugly present she bought him colouring books which mainly featured insects and their ancient fossils, images of fantastical creatures whose like could never be seen again and, in comparison with which, his mother looked quite normal. He magnified the insects until they looked like the monsters he dreamed about.

‘You are too solemn,’ she said, ‘we must dance and sing, look happy. Nobody likes a dreary-mouth.’ She tried to teach him to waltz but his legs were leaden. ‘Never mind,’ she assured him, ‘You’re really smart. You probably ruined my life but you’re my little genius,’ and took him out of school. ‘I won’t have you ruined by mediocrity.’ She babbled a lot but, oddly, there was one word which for her was a red rag, never to be mentioned; that was ‘love’. When she heard it uttered on TV she snorted her derision.

Henceforth Traut would be homeschooled and solitary. A tiny piece of wasteland at the rear of their building was his playground and escape. To this he brought his magnifying glass to examine the tiny world of the undergrowth. Ants became his obsession. They crossed and recrossed a tiny path at astonishing speeds. They reminded the boy of the pedestrians in their bubbles on the Manhattan pavements, all rushing – to where, he wondered? Their business always seemed to propel them urgently, never colliding, dodging each other like ants. People are just like ants, he decided, always in a hurry but, unlike people, ants did not confuse him. He learned that the world’s ant population weighed five times more than human beings – roughly the equivalent of 34 billion people. But his little friends didn’t take up as much space, didn’t scream or have hysterics or make loud noises.

They became his playmates. He captured a few in a jar, brought them proudly home but his mother screamed ‘Termites’ and climbed onto a chair. ‘Get those outa here,’ she ordered. When he demurred she flushed them down the toilet. He smirked; you can’t drown ants. Their huge hindquarters are buoyancy aides. He rushed down to rescue them from the drainpipe.

One habit he took in his stride: reading. At an early age he became a bookworm consuming his mother’s pulp fictions, learning that all relationships begin shakily, for a while are unhappy but, finally, all misunderstandings having been neatly sorted out, people kiss and live happily ever after. He liked those stories. An affectionate child, he expressed love for most of his mother’s visiting lady friends, was fussed over by them until his early adolescence when they drifted away. But when his mother went out to work he could not be left alone. She organised a single babysitter, one of the younger ladies of the profession. Her name was Maria; and she was pretty; she proudly claimed to be Irish, was full of laughter and enjoyed listening to Traut’s mother reminiscing on the old days when customers had style, and manners. Traut adored her. She found him harmless, enjoyed his innocent embraces, promised to marry him when he grew up. When one day his mother found him playing with himself in a corner she was horrified. Maria laughed when she was told and said it was perfectly natural for young males, in fact was only an attention-catching device. She took the juvenile in hand, taught him all he needed to know about proper self-pleasuring. She convinced Traut’s mother that this therapy was normal, even essential. She had learned the theory from a distinguished shrink, she bragged, one of her regular customers. Otherwise the boy might become seriously frustrated, the shrink had said. That could lead to further personal imbalance and ultimately to sexual deviance and perhaps an inclination to rape. Self-pleasuring was an acknowledged and necessary safety valve, her expert had said; it was taught in all institutions that housed people like Traut.

‘Don’t mention institutions in my house,’ said his mother. She warned Maria to keep her foul mouth shut and her theories to herself. Traut persisted in his innocent adoration of the young woman. Finally, in a moment of idle curiosity the big-hearted Maria resolved to discover how young a boy must be to function as a mature man. It seemed a natural development of her lessons with him. Maria was pleasantly surprised by his natural ability. Traut was astonished by the full primal act, found it earth shaking. Maria enjoyed it so much that that she forgot to take the usual precautions. For the following weeks Traut felt grown up, lived in a romantic cocoon, looked forward to her visits, thought Maria would always be there to delight him. This was the utopia in which he lived until Maria lied to his mother that one of her careless (on purpose, she said) customers had fallen in love with her, made her pregnant and wished to marry her. He was rich, she said, owned a supermarket somewhere so she could easily learn to love him. She vanished from Traut’s life. He missed her badly until his mother, not a little jealous of his feelings for Maria, decided to prick his bubble, sacked Maria and told the boy that she had gone and got married, with unseemly haste she added. She told him his ex-darling was now a respectable matron named Mrs Hiram Randee and lived somewhere way out in the suburbs of Boston and that he might as well forget her. But he could not. Randee, Randee he repeated the name endlessly until his mother shouted at him to stop. He dearly wanted to track his love down, persuade her to come back. One day he set out to find her. But the journey was too far, he had no experience of travelling on his own, the confusion of subways, trains, noisy traffic and crowds of people rushing hither and thither intimidated him and, utterly confused, he soon gave up the idea and retreated. He had no idea where he was and the police brought the disturbed young man home.

Traut resigned himself to the strange unreliability of people and women as well as life in general, relapsed into his solitary daydreaming, and even lost interest in masturbation.

As he matured he took refuge in writing fantasy, setting his short tales in a Technicolor country with a makey uppey name, Ishkastan. His characters were unique species named variously after the fossils he had once coloured: Opabinias, Hallucigenia, Ediacarans. Wiwaxia and suchlike. Some of them looked like ants. When roused, he decided, they could become a killer species. But he attributed to them a certain nobility and beauty, a quality, he had read, that was in the eye of the beholder. His characters were solid, imperturbable, and as unemotional as the Cambrian fossils after which he named them. None of them wore clothes. He discovered the Natural History museum at Central Park and visited it every Sunday, making notes. When he learned that little birds were descended from large Archaeopteryx and Pterodactyls he wondered from which species ants might have descended and what, by a normal contortion of evolution, might have descended from the little fellows. The library at Bryant answered many of his questions, but not that one.

The years dribbled on. Traut’s adolescent ambitions to be a writer were partially realised when, over his mother’s protests, he was drafted into the military. His severely limited social skills made him perfect draft fodder, exactly what the army needed. A literate pacifist but a useless soldier, he was detailed to record evidence of the spread of freedom and democracy in Afghanistan. Years later, that military ambition – which cost thousands of young lives – would be abandoned as hopeless but in those early days it was a no-brainer for a fiction writer like Traut. With nothing of substance to report, he just made it up. His superior officers ignored everything he wrote.

One free half-day he strayed off a mountain path towards a local village in a section of not-yet-napalmed paradise, lay down to compose a rural idyll and was bitten in the leg by an Oxus cobra, common in those parts. After mouth to calf resuscitation by a pretty villager, the rest of her gentle relatives brought him back to health. He was enjoying a lovely war until his fellow draftees at base camp noticed his absence and took a day off from their war games to come and rescue him.

‘Let’s do this thing’ was their battle cry.

Among their toys were drones, flame throwers, bazookas and other conventional gewgaws with which they reduced the village and its gentle inhabitants to ash whilst liberating their buddy. In this way Traut became the only objective witness to attend the subsequent massacre inquiry and he didn’t make that up. He was faced with charges of desertion, colluding with the enemy, endangering his comrades, destruction of government property and a couple more indictments that only a military mind could trump up. Unusually for a writer his lips became sealed, especially by the promise of an honourable discharge, the award of a Bronze Heart and a considerable lump sum. In return for these mercies he signed the army’s non-disclosure clause, an act that would teach him truth was negotiable, facts manipulable, to be shaped as one pleased; such insights became invaluable to Traut’s literary flights of fancy.

He was discharged from the army on medical grounds. It was in the veteran’s hospital in which he was being debriefed that one day he was delighted to see, in his shaving mirror, a colony of ants. When he turned, they were gone but the illusion made him feel at home. This period felt like a holiday, apart from the people in white coats who made him write about his experiences. He was trying to forget the horrors he had seen but images still invaded his head and he wrote them down like movies. In these the ants held Kalashnikovs aimed at the camera.

A fellow patient, who had once been an actor, read Traut’s vivid scribbles about blood, guts and ants and passed them on to a producer acquaintance that saw the potential for an anti-war movie. With judicious rewriting the Yanks became the necessary heroes. By the time Traut was released from hospital ‘Boom!’ had been turned into a hilarious animated movie and Traut was the fleeting toast of a tiny niche in the New York film community. A