One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [135]
40.
Thursday Next
A trip to Text Grand Central is a must for the technophile, and a day spent on one of the main imaginotransference-engine floors is not to be missed. A visit will dispel forever the notion that those at TGC do little to smooth out the throughputting of the story to the reader’s imagination. Tours around the Reader Feedback Loop are available on Tuesday afternoons, but owing to the sometimes hazardous nature of feedback, exposure is limited to eighteen seconds.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (15th edition)
It took nearly an hour to find what we were looking for. Sandwiched between Political Thriller and Spy Thriller and well within the condemned book’s debris trail was Psychological Thriller. The whole “Am I really Thursday?” stuff I’d been laboring through over the past few days had all the hallmarks of a PsychoThriller plot device and made total sense of Thursday’s obscure “confusion enlightenment” sentence.
Finding the genre, however, was harder. It was difficult to spot from the air, as a sense of ambiguity blurred the edges of the small genre, and with good reason. Psychological was another “rogue genre” where nothing could be taken at face value, trusted or even believed, a genre whose very raison d’être was to confuse and obfuscate. Often accused of harboring known felons and offering safe haven to deposed leaders of other rogue genres, PsychoThriller could never be directly indicted, as nothing was ever quite what it seemed—a trait it shared with others that also had a tenuous hold on reality, such as Creative Accounting and Lies to Tell Your Partner When S/He Finds Underwear in the Glove Box.
We found it by using our small onboard Textual Sieve to home in on a trail of confused reader feedback, and Sprockett expertly brought us in for a landing at the corner of Forsyth and Ludlum. We walked across a vacant lot to the unfenced border of Psychological Thriller. The weather, naturally, was atmospheric. On the Thriller side of the border, the skies were clear, but across into Psychological there seemed to be an impenetrable wall of rain-soaked air. Jurisfiction had considerately posted signs along the border at regular intervals, warning trespassers to stay away or potentially suffer “lethal levels of bewilderment.” Only fools or the very brave ventured into Psychological Thriller alone.
“Ma’am?” said Sprockett, his eyebrow flickering “Alarm.”
“Problems?”
“You find me hugely embarrassed.”
“What is it? You need winding?”
“No, ma’am. It’s the damp. Humans might fear viruses and old age, two things with which cog-based life-forms have very little issue. But when it comes to corrosion, honey, magnets and damp, I’m afraid to say I must warn you that a rebuild might be necessary, and spare parts are becoming scandalously expensive.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Just wait for me here.”
I stepped across. Inside Psychological Thriller it was raining, and night. The cold wind lashed my face and drove the rain into every crevice of my clothes, until within a very short period I was soaked through. The tops of the trees swayed dangerously in the wind, and every now and then there was a flash of lightning followed by a splintering crack and the sound of a tree falling with a muffled crash somewhere in the dark.
I moved on, occasionally sinking ankle-deep in the marshy ground. After a few hundred yards, I came to a small clearing of tussock grass, pools of brackish water and a scattering of broken branches. On the far side, partially immersed in ooze, were the remains of a TransGenre Taxi. The front had been staved in, the engine torn out and the bodywork rippled and bent. Scraps of tree had been caught in the side mirrors as the taxi tore through the foliage on its way down. While I stared at the mangled wreck, the lightning flashed, and on the side was painted NO TIPS and, farther along, 1517. It was Thursday’s cab.
I hurried round to see if anyone had survived. I was perhaps in too much haste and swiftly sank up to my thighs in the fetid waters. I extricated myself with a considerable