D. D. D.: A Short Life

D. D. D.

A Short Life

LUCA DEMETRIADI

What follows is the ghost-written autobiography, against his will or knowledge and as accurately as possible, of Dimon Dimitrov Dimitrovich, my dear friend. We shall follow Dimitri’s line as it runs flat, starts to zag under its own weight, and then is interrupted by an unhappy zig. But fear not, in its final moments it all teases curving into a delightful circle.

Poor Dimitri struggled everyday with the flatness of the sky. He found it equally perturbing that it was not a more urgent topic in conversation. Try as he might, his obsession with raising interest in the phenomenon (he believed that it was in need of immediate study) did little to titillate his peers, and even less so his public. Dimitri’s first article on the flatness, titled ‘On the Flatness,’ was enjoyed by many, though misunderstood as a satire; his second article, ‘The Sky is Flat!’, was knocked by critics and the author was accused of performing the same trick twice. But Dimitri was as persistent as a pigeon, and just as nervous. Poor, nervous Dimitri had almost fallen out of common society as a result of his perceived delusion. And this is where we find him, sitting in an office like a wax figurine:

“I am not joking!” Dimitri yelled, and “lift up your chin and look at how flat it is! Day or night it never ceases my friend.”

“My friend, maxims will take you nowhere. And you make little sense”.

And so, Dimitri was fired from his position by the head of the English faculty, who had recently published a study on the vaccinating effects of local honey against hay fever. This is due to it being comprised of local types of pollen, thus creating an immunisation response. Dimitri had found the work derivative, as well as non-literary. Official documentation stated that Dr. D. D. Dimitrovich was released on account of a derangement issue.

Four minutes after Dimitri arrived home with the contents of his desk and bookshelves, with only enough time to have removed one of his alpaca socks, his exterminator knocked on his door. He had come to check the glue-traps (“same as yesterday,” walking in with a chuckle) in the hope that, if they had not all been taken, he could fill-in the rat-hole knowing that all the rats were dead. Alas (“rats!”), they were all gone. The rat man would always stay after laying the new set of traps, and he was a great complainer: the difficulties of his job (“you’re always six metres away from a rat you know”); his drinking (“rat-arsed”); or that someone was stealing from him and he smelled a rat. Dimitri admired his interlocutor’s passion for his job, a trait lacking amongst his former colleagues, and would often offer a biscuit. “Did you see the sky today?” “Yes, lovely weather we’re having.” “Yes, I like the weather in general. Did you see the sky? It’s still fl--” “Yes, yes, very blue! I’ll come and check the traps tomorrow.”

Natalia Sinelnik

This dialogue really isn’t working. Dimitri, as always, resolved to try again tomorrow. Then, as he had done the day before, and as he would do the next, he took his big ladder out to the hill near to a local public footpath. He would climb the hill, then his big ladder, and at the multiplied highest point available to this strange hero observe whether the day would shed any light through his binoculars. Such points of interest to Dimitri concerned how high he might need to fly to touch the ceiling; how a flat surface could appear so dynamic since it was surely not a trick of screens; and, most concerningly, why the sky might be this way.

During his earliest tests he would try reaching with his arms, although he had read in magazines that the newest rockets being developed across the ocean could reach heights that would render his arms obsolete. His current technique, until he could afford an aircraft, involved a dozen laser pointers.

It is necessary to clarify that Dimitri’s sky was certainly flat. As such, this is not the journal of a madman for the delight of perverts, but a real story which almost observes the unities. He was on the uneven floor of a rectangular box; the opposite face of the box was perfectly smooth and had the quality of a constantly developing watercolour. The analogy is floored since Dimitri’s world was not a box, it just had one flat face. It was Dimitri’s frustration that people were so at ease with the flatness that it had figuratively disappeared.

And the implications were astronomical. Dimitri’s twelfth article showed this by disrobing various literary allusions related to his topic. For Shakespeare was right to call the moon a thief, a fat parasite of a fly, an artist’s trick to steal light at little cost. His fifth article on the topic (critical attention dispersed after the fourth), an extract of which is appended below, is more successful in describing how to observe the strange phenomenon. For now, metaphors will be left to Dimon D. Dimitrov, our wily misanthrope:

Firstly, the observer should find the lines, which a layman can most easily perceive from atop an incline such that the sun sets behind your town directly in front of and below from you. The lines are straight and evenly spaced from this angle. The lines are made of clouds or shades of light or blue. That these lines are evenly spaced reveals the flatness, regardless of the horizon we perceive on our ground-floor. Atop an incline is a useful position, as the observer can see descending silhouettes gaining in headroom as they go downwards towards the tower-mounted sundials (metonymic: you

should be at such a height to view only the topof your town). This phenomenon has been poeticized in the works of Hogg, Coleridge, and Bock…

I stop him here, but a curious reader should think about following Dimitri’s studies further.

As sometimes happened, Dimitri had forgotten that he was nearby a favourite local spot of Samuel Whizgers, his exterminator, and didn’t spy his approach through the binoculars. Dimitri tumbled from his perch at the “zy” of Samuel’s sentence, but he did not let this topple his spirit. Neither felt a need to elaborate on their strange activity to the other, and indeed, that their routines had a habit of crossing over the other’s for the past few years had made them well acquainted, if not amicable. On this day, for the first time, and also for the last time, though not in any ominous sense, Dimitri accepted Samuel’s invitation to a rat-dance dinner party he held every Friday night. After the failure of his second marriage, Dimitri would only make himself seen amongst university circles; amongst those, it must be said, who were rather tired of seeing him. Dimitri thought Samuel privileged to tap his knowledge; Samuel felt pity for his strange client.

Poor Dimitrovich was even estranging to the eye. It would be unkind to describe him but know that he stood out everywhere for wearing sandals. In a world such as theirs, with warm days and soft, sandy floors, even the elderly would let loose their soles. Samuel, barefoot, led Dimitri into the supermarket.

“Thing I like about Coles-” (Dimitri thought that his exterminator’s skin must be hot) “- is that you only need to pay for one thing you want and everything else is free.” Dimitri gave an understanding nod, but his gaze had been drawn to a particularly two-dimensional cloud above his head and the smile perceived by Samuel was not intended for his scam. They went in: Dimitri went to find frozen gyoza to fry that afternoon at the beach; Samuel went to find the ingredients for shakshuka, enough for his mischief that evening. At the selfcheckout Samuel said he would pay: he scanned his cheapest item and clicked checkout but continued to scan, crashing the system, while everything still appeared on the receipt for the barefoot security guard to check on their way out. Dimitri, inspired by his new friend, was doing his best to relate to the background characters of his life, commenting with glee on the almost non-existent cost of their hefty grocery haul to the hefty guard. The jig was up.

They ran back into the sun, the gazumped guard trailing, then went to the beach where Dimitri fried gyoza on a grill he always left in a small cliff cave. Dimitri, like wax in Athens, wished the sun would hide its beams. In the water they threw jellyfish at each other. Samuel went home to prepare for his guests, while Dimitri swam out to explore his favourite coves, losing his right sandal in a particularly strong riptide. The sun, in its daily illusion, lowered itself towards the water, now still and fresh. Samuel leant over the balcony and “shakshuka is ready,” he said. Dimitri had never tried shakshuka but did not want to embarrass himself around real people. And of course, Samuel had spent all afternoon since the beach simmering his pot.

Some food historians believe that the dish spread to Spain and the greater Middle East from Ottoman Turkey, while others think it originated in Morocco. It was brought to Israel by Tunisian Jews as part of the mass Jewish exodus from Muslim nations. It was brought to Dimitri by Samuel.

“Start go go it will get cold,” Samuel’s Israeli accent said. Samuel’s empty seat was to Dimitri’s immediate right; to his left sat a Scandinavian girl with fluorescent green hair, who was opposite a Scandinavian girl with fluorescent pink hair, to the left of whom sat a teenage replica of Samuel (his younger brother, I assume). Pink told Dimitri about the benefits of eating exclusively foraged roots. Other zany characters filled the rest of the long tableau, though only on the fringes of Dimitri’s perception. No one wanted to start eating without Samuel at the table. The power vacuum of a popular rat exterminator. Someone might gesture for a scoop but stop themselves; someone might take a bite, approve of the cuisine, and then put their spoon down to show that they were only tasting.

Waiting, Green began a lecture about her research into how sleeping position, affecting how your feet interact with the mattress or sleeping mat, can cause different muscular structures in the soles of different people. In turn, this affects how one interacts with the natural world, as different muscle structures are more adept at picking up different frequencies of vibration as one walks around. Such pseudo-science was the nail in the corpse for Dimitri, and although he continued to “yes” and “of course” at irregularly spaced intervals, he instead eavesdropped on a conversation behind him.

“… every word should be fat… fat as you can make it… right word…. fur… with layers, layers… various understandings… different… reader… long tale… [laughter]… efficient ink...” Dimitri was no creative writer and any significance glided over him. Thankfully, his chair at the table faced Samuel’s sliding wall of glass that grabbed and framed parts of that larger, more important rectangle. He quietly watched and waited, sagging in his chair.

When Samuel came everyone could eat. It was a happy Friday night dinner, but Dimitri had developed a nasty habit of finishing too soon. He did not like eating around others and he found himself the foreigner at a foreigners’ table. He focused on stomaching rather than on conversation, and his few gags went unnoticed. He finished silently and was pleased – but Samuel was still describing his pot of imported hummus, and both of his hands were clean. Dimitri sighed; Samuel told a joke; Green and Pink harmonised their laughter in a very charming way.

Samuel put one arm around the back of Dimitri’s neck and “Dimitri is a hungry boy,” he said, rubbing his friend’s stomach with his other arm, while his other arm reached for another serving for his friend who evidently loved his cooking. Samuel felt very close to Dimitri that evening; Dimitri threw up twice in Samuel’s guest-bathroom, and only a double dosage of white pills would settle his stomach.

“Stop, Tommy, no! No food!” Tommy, Samuel’s cat, dangled a vibrating dragonfly from its mouth. The dragonfly escaped over the balcony but to Dimitri’s delight, at a certain point in the sunset, it collapsed itself against the inevitable

invisible surface and fell. Dimitri excused himself and went to collect it.

Leaving the table to go outside for his morning coffee (it seemed a lovely day, even at this time of year), Dimitri was surprised at the quantity of dry leaves blowing in from the church and rustling across his patio. His autumn ovation lasted for a dozen or so seconds and was never repeated again. Congratulations on your second day, sang a little pipit, but it stopped. He went to gather conkers, but he was too early or late, and they were not in season. No matter: Dimitri took his glass square from the drawer of his desk (the curtains drawn) and sketched the unhappy remains of his dragonfly. As expected, the only sign of impact was the flattened head which had caused a crumpling effect along the rivets of its long body. Strangely, Dimitri shaded his dragonfly a bright pink; this must have been his artistic license, since it was, in fact, a brilliant green [running out of colours. Unities gone. Sick of this false world – zig.].

Over the course of the next decades, Dimitri somehow found himself a wife whom he loved, a small apartment with a dachshund, occasional happiness, and a son whom he named after himself. He continued to study the flatness of the sky and its various related phenomena but would always make it home in time for dinner. He never uncovered any marketable evidence, he was never offered another job, and eventually he discovered that he had never been able to convince his wife that he wasn’t insane. Dimitri Jr. turned sixteen on the day his father was committed.

Every sixteen pages my notebook offers me a charming image. On this page a small white rabbit was pulling itself over Ming’s left shoulder and peering at her face with interest. Sixteen pages later in a high-rise apartment in far-off Beijing, the elevator lurched to a halt and the light flicked out while Ming was thrown to the floor. When there are so many words to choose from it is hard to know what should come next.

Stop. Something has started to quiver. The white water is rippling with misperceptions and crooked lines leave blanks where my ink should be. Let me give myself to anecdotes and ease this muddle: by the sea I saw the moon’s red egg lay a golden snake in the water; on the mountain shadowscreens of skeletal lovers danced across the valley; the sky is flat in Oxford. See for which of these is real—camouflage by apposition. Apologies for the phoney poeticisms, but how to tell you all these things without reversed impressions?

But something’s wrong, chief. This citadel is crumbling again. As I do most days, I left my pen at my desk around the last hour of daylight before dusk to ramble the repurposed landfill nature park in search of doe. The main part of the November trees were alight with thick shadows and afternoon highlights that were vivid, real, alive. Uniformly (from my relative perspective) the bottom foot-and-a-half of the trunk at the base of each tree was dull and grey, like a screen rendering downwards but running out of power before it can spark all of the pixels. This citadel is crumbling again, and I can see the ocean from my holding cell. I transposed the broken trees into a photo; later I will try to write it down and grapple back some sanity (the sky was an expansion of the tree-glitch: a foot-anda-half [relative] at its base was dull with clouds, but like the trees the upper trunk of the sky and its branches were azure, blue, brilliant, etc.). Beautiful, yes, but fix it, please.

There is not enough serenity in my imagery but trust that it should be there. Unusual things are difficult to make beautiful with words. The rats are scratching behind my eyes. Sorry for that. I hope Dimitri is okay. How can I tell Dimitri’s story when my own is going sly? I shall let the reader in on a secret. There was for Demetri that unenviable choice: having morning coffee with a little white pill or sitting still in depression. His artificial co-characters made as little sense as his natural world: a ship of fools beached where the sand meets the sea… poor Dimitri, I’ve put you through so much. But it’s not his choice to make, unfortunately.

Maybe I should be more honest and kill Dimitri and make this first person. But I shan’t be shot: no, no, I shall not be shot. Turn on the kettle it’s time for my coffee. Dimitri will be left in his sanitorium, writing his memoirs [note the tease of circularity – zig.], on a floor so cold that all the other prisoners are wearing shoes oddly akin to the kind loaned by bowling alleys. I am sorry, my friend, but there is nothing else that I can do. I will at least give you the loveliest epitaph since that of Timon, whose play has always been my favourite:

Dimitri is dead, who hath outstretched his span,

Some beast wrote this, there does not live a man. Dead, sure, and this is his grave. My waxy reversal is dripping in the sun.

Luca Demetriadi is an English Language and Literature finalist at the University of Oxford, currently studying and applying for Masters programmes in Australia, from where he originates.