----Nasturtiums---- by Robyn Hitchcock

			(published in Reflex magazine, Feb. '92)

	"Your liberation is in your hands" was the message emblazoned on the
rose-colored tongue of paper in the fortune cookie.  Orlando curled the little
strip of wisdom around and breathed through it like a cigarette end.  Across
the restaurant, a huge, papier-mache bell was being squeezed past a piano by
two men dressed as sailors.  They had tight, white trousers and looked happy.
The bell would hang directly above Commander Zeiss his Roots when they took the
stage this evening.  But by then, Orlando would be long gone.
	The future, mused Orlando, is a weird hotel.  Everyone has a room
reserved, but no one ever checks in.  It is hauled out of the past, a lethal
combination of spaghetti and trust.  Like a piece of spaghetti, the 
existence of end presupposes the existence of the other.  In fact, there might
only be a black hairy mollusc, grasping greedily at the pallid white tube of
pasta.  Thank heavens I'm not an obsessive, thought Orlando.
	He prodded the remains of his runic noodles.  A lazy hologram of a 
cheap watch floated up to just below the oily surface.  Two o'clock!  Bast 
would be here soon.  He half-heartedly poked at the holographic watch, but his
chopstick passed right through the hands.  You can't hurry time.
	"You can, you know."
	"What?" Orlando whirled around to see an ancient leather motorcycle
glove slipped easily onto his shoulder.  The glove encased the hand of his
uncle, Herbert Frame, who wore a khaki tweed suit and a blood-red bow-tie.
Blood is quite a dull color when it's dried- and Herbert's bow-tie was no
exception.
	"You're thinking about time again, laddie," mouthed Herbert in his
slightly out-of-synch voice, "but you can go as fast as you please.  You can
skip entire decades if you feel like it.  Lots of us do- and nobody takes a 
blind bit of notice."
	Orlando folded his arms and stared defiantly at his noodles.  The 
hologram was fading fast.  His uncle continued, his high droning voice
circling like a reconnaissance aircraft.
	"I know you, Orlando.  You're always in a hurry, like your poor 
mother."
	"I never had a mother, nncle Herbert." Orlando shifted his dark intense
gaze to his pastrified relation.  "That's what you always told me."
	"Eh?  Speak up laddie- I'm in a bit of a hurry."
	Herbert Frame was now sitting at Orlando's table, apparently listening
to the remains of Orlando's meal.  As he watched more closely, however, he saw
Uncle Herbert replace his stethoscope with another thin, quasi-surgical tube
through which he was siphoning the tepid noodle soup into a slim crystal flask.
	"There!" he exclaimed finally. "That should suffice.  Your food is your
future, Orlando." He squinted into the opaque flask, where now only the 
faintest outline of the holographic watch remained: "And yours looks-
interesting."
	Herbert Frame disengaged himself from the kidney-shaped table and swung
away across the silicon floor.  It was only after he had dissapeared backwards
through the swing doors that Orlando realized the motorcycle glove was still on
his shoulder.
	"Ugh! Beastly thing!" he yelped.  He brushed it off, and it fell to the
floor, shattering like a brittle, dead grub.
	Scarcely had Orlando settled down again when his eyes were suddenly 
obscured by musky fingers. A powerful head met the back of his own, and a 
voice like a furry alarm clock purred into his blindness.
	"Bad Orlando! Sit! You've been hurrying time.  I can just...smell it!
Wicked Uncle Herbert has been measuring your leftovers and you're feeling
unstable."
	His sister Bast swirled around to the seat opposite him and smiled
her permanent smile.
	"I- look, Bast, time is just another way of adding up.  Things are 
just-"
	"- not that linear!" said Bast, annoying him by echoing and 
anticipating him simultaneously.  "I know, I'm sorry."
	"It's all right," Orlando shrugged and smiled. "We're only the 
percipient.  Time doesn't exist as such...Er, how are you, anyway?  I haven't
seen you since-"
	"This morning at nine," chimed the feline Bast precisely.
	Orlando flinched.
	"No- it was yesterday morning at nine."
	"No dice, brother that begins and ends with an O.  You left this
morning.  You filled the time between as milk fills a saucer.  And now you are
here."
	The two men had finished hoisting the papier-mache bell over the low
cabaret stage.  It was impossible to see up inside, but it looked promising.  
The sailors began to dust the shiny black eyes of the deer heads that wer
mounted behind the amplifiers.
	"Bast- it was yesterday.  I've been to...to," he wavered, gesturing for
a bit, "to...Sussex"- he alighted gleefully on the right word like a hungry
mosquito.  Now it was coming back to him!  "I was in the Dying Swan all 
evening."
	His sister looked at him sorrowfully and dipped her finger in the 
sugar.  She gave the overwhelming impression of wearing a hat when in fact she
didn't.  She held up her finger for Orlando to lick, and then removed it as his
tongue flickered past his front teeth.
	"We're going there TONIGHT, Orlando.  You haven't even BEEN there yet.
You must stop trying to remember the future.  It may never happen.  And if it
doesn't, you'll have mortgaged your past for nothing."  Her tone softened
after this brutal barrage of realism, and she licked some of the sugar off her
finger with her precise little cat's tongue.  "Try to face it, Orlando- time is
a river, and you'd be a lot happier sometimes if you swam with the current, 
like everyone else."
	Orlando closed the door of the shiny, revitalized phone box and swam 
across the courtyard of the Dying Swan.  The great chestnut trees around the 
pool rendered it shadowy, but a series of underwater spotlights crisscrossed 
the bottom of the pool and enhanced its turquoise glow in the Sussex twilight.
Additional lighting was supplied by the squadron of red telephone boxes that
flanked the pool on three sides.  With smoked glass windows, they served 
mostly as changing rooms, but all were equipped with phones, and some stood 
open to the promising dusk.  In the doorway of one basked a golden figure, 
chest pushed insolently forwards, lazily supporting itself on its elbows; 
whilst a black gelatinous mummy sprawled in front of another, its shiny edges
fringed with green, and its feet dipping into the blue waters.
	Orlando dried himself in the booth nearest the Dying Swan.  The phone
rang.
	"Hello, how are you?" inquired a not very curious voice.  Orlando 
didn't recognize it.
	"Er...what's the time?" countered Orlando.
	"Ohh...the time?" queried the voice. "Almost 9:30.  So, how's things?"
	"Which particular things?"
	"Ohhh," said the voice, as if it were squeezing out a long piece of 
dough, "I don't know-you know..."
	"What-you mean to say I know something but you don't?"
	"Steady on," bleated the voice, trying to put a brake on the hostility
but actually adding to it, "I was just saying hello." Orlando did not reply.
The vocce continued.
	"Have you noticed the similarity between people's voices and their
handwriting?"
	Orlando finished drying between his toes.
	"I've never seen your handwriting."
	"How do you know?"
	"I've no idea who you are."
	"Actually you have, actually."
	"No, I bloody haven't."
	"If you knew who I was IN REALITY, you'd know that I was somebody that
knew you."
	"Who?
"
	The line went dead.  Orlando thought he saw Herbert Frame scuttling
through the chestnut shadows.  He was about to leave the phone booth when his
hair prickled in shock.  On either side of the paneled glass windows, the 
golden figure and the mummy with the shiny green corona were waving at him.  
Each mouthed soundlessly, admonishing him in slow motion, as if they were