One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [72]
“What’s that random sensation of memories I keep getting?”
“It’s smells. They have a way of firing off recollections. No one knows why.”
I didn’t understand and moved rapidly on. “Why can’t I see anything?”
“You need to open your eyes.”
So I did. I sat and blinked for some minutes. The view was quite astonishing, not only in range but in detail. I had been used to seeing only what was relevant within a scene. Back home, anything extra would have been unnecessary and was a pasty shade of magnolia with the texture of uncooked dough. Here there was everything, in all directions, in full color and in full detail. Several books’ worth of description was just sitting there, with no one except me to revel in its glorious detail. The trees swayed ever so gently in the breeze, and the clouds moved slowly across the heavens. It was summer, and the flower beds had erupted in a sumptuous palette of color, while on the air were delicate tastes of cooking and garbage and rain and earth. I could hear stuff, too, except not one thing at a time, but all things at all times. The delicate symphony of sounds that reached my ears so heaped together that it was difficult to separate anything out at all, and I sat there quite numbed by the overload of sensations.
“How do they filter it out?” I asked.
“Humans filter well,” said the voice. “In fact, they can filter out almost anything. Sound, vision, smells, love, anger, passion, reason. Everything except hunger and thirst, cold and hot. No need to hurry. Take your time.”
I sat there for an hour, attempting to make sense of the world, and I did reasonably well, all things considered. In that time I managed to figure out I was sitting on a bench in a small and well-kept park hemmed in by redbrick houses on every side. There was a children’s play area, a pond, a flower bed and two trees, both silver birch. A main road was to one side, and on a building opposite were two billboards. One was advertising the Goliath Corporation’s supposed good work on behalf of the community, and the other promoted “Daphne Farquitt Day” on Friday, which began with a celebration of her works and ended with a Farquitt Readathon. It was a name I recognized, or course. The popularity of the romance author dictated that she had a genre all her own.
“It’s beautiful!” I said at last. “I could stay here and watch the clouds for the whole twelve hours alone!”
“Many do,” came the voice again.
I looked around. Aside from an impertinent squirrel foraging on the grass, I was entirely alone.
“Who are you?” I asked. “And why can’t I see you?”
“Bradshaw asked me to keep an eye on you,” came the voice. “The name’s Square—Agent Square. If you want to know why you can’t see me, it’s because I’m from Flatland and bounded in only two dimensions. At the moment I’m presenting my edge to you. Since I have no thickness, I am effectively invisible. Watch.”
A line a half inch thick and two feet long appeared in the air quite near me. The line separated and opened out into a thin rectangle, which broadened until it was a square, hanging in the air.
“How do you do?” I said.
“Oh, can’t complain,” said Square. “A spot of trapezoidism in this chill weather, but hey-ho. I worked with the real Thursday several times. Do you really look like her?”
“You can’t see, then?”
“Since I am only two-dimensional,” said Agent Square, “I can see the world only as a series of infinitely thin slices, like a ham. May I approach and have a look?”
Square moved closer. Out of curiosity I put my hand inside the area bounded by his vertices, and a soft bluish light gave me four rings around my fingers.
“Four disks is all I can see,” said Square. “Viewing one dimension up is always a bit confusing. Mind you, for you people bounded in three dimensions, it’s no different.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Time,” said Square, “is your next dimension, so to anyone in the RealWorld it appears as your third spatial dimension does to me—a thin slice in plain view but with the