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By Root 800 0

covers whilst outside the temperature remained confoundedly, relatively constant. No, I kept the world to myself and to Irva. I spun myself around and around! And once I had taken all my clothes off it seemed to me, with only my feet below the ankles and my hands below the wrists and my head above the neck still visibly mine, that I was still clothed, only now my clothing was the world. I was unable to undress myself completely ever again. I took great care of the world, lubricating it carefully every evening with moisturising cream, just as Pig Mikel had told me to, though there was a spot around Lake Baikal (the small of my back) that hardly received any lubrication at all, but perhaps that scarcely mattered since the lake is the deepest continental body of water to be found anywhere on the globe. So what did I care about little, fiddly, human relationships when I was the whole world? What did I care? What did I care?

SOME MONTH and a half after I was living with the world, shortly after six o’clock one morning, there was another earth tremor. And this time there were casualties. This time a few houses lost more than their chimneys. This time a few walls sagged and groaned, and then buried twelve people. And when those twelve people were pulled out into the light once more only one of them still remembered how to breathe. There were cracks on buildings, not terminal cracks, but warning cracks: step quietly, go to church and pray frequently. People began to walk in the middle of the roads now, viewing those buildings on either side with distrust and with fear. The shares of the scaffolding company of Mirin, Bao and Russell went up. The home insurance company of Collky and Platt feared bankruptcy. Parents let their children sleep in tents in Ventis Park. People played their stereos and hi-fis inside their homes at barely audible volumes. God became popular. The bishop applied to the Vatican to make Grand Duke Lubatkin a saint, so that he might protect the city. Pope John Paul II eventually politely declined.

IT WAS the second earth tremor which made me finally understand. For who could argue with the vastness of a whole city shaking? How could a single person, no matter how tall, argue with that? As the city trembled, as buildings many times my size—so solid yesterday but now as frail and unconfident as old men—swayed in the tremor’s wind, yes, as the surface moved, came the deep suspicion, the terrible worry, the suffocating thought that even though I was everywhere I would be going nowhere. The earthquake had made me realise that I was Alva. That I was only Alva. That was all. So there I was again, shrunken to the size of Alva Lina Dapps.

AND THESE are the actions that surrounded my shrinking.

I was in my bedroom when the earthquake struck. Mother wrenched open the door to see if I was safe. I lay on my bed, my nightdress wrinkled up above my knees. Mother saw my tattoo. Mother saw a good portion of South Africa, and in that instant South Africa changed from being South Africa into an insult. And it was then that I shrank, I diminished in front of the slowly comprehending, and ever widening, face of Mother. Mother, mouth stretched, turned herself into a siren. She shrieked and screamed so much that Irva rushed herself into my room; she wailed so much and bellowed so loudly that some good people of Veber Street even came running, fearing some earthquake mischief. They pounded the front door open in their eagerness to enact neighbourly assistance, they clambered up the stairs in a crowd of altruism—the sound of which returned Irva immediately to her room before they had quite ascended—yes, they hurled themselves into my bedroom and it was only then, I suppose, it was only when they had halted, that they understood that the screams of Mother, which they had at first believed to be screams of distress, were in fact screams of vituperation. And they saw Mother, the siren, deafening with alarm, now about her daughter, pulling the nightdress from her, revealing, here and there, more bits and pieces of the world, for a second