The Time of the Titans

Chapter 36: The Masque of Kuka

'To escape from the Inland Empire, you fly', said the first line in the sheet of paper I saw in the lone typewriter. It was an old model, perhaps a Remington. I saw it daily in the window of the antique shop next to the café where I often went in afternoon, as it was in a street near the Institute. The street was paved with cobblestone. The passage was arched, and one could only pass on foot. I walked my bike through it as I made the shortcut from the medieval Old Town to the ultra-modern new buildings of the campus housing Landorf's Institute.

'No need to be a pilot to fly', said another line. 'You follow the fly circus.'

What was my flight about anyway? There was no sea here. The island was a distant memory. But once I would return, I told myself.

Just how many times I had passed this little shop, paid attention on the strange items on display in its window, and never entered. Was it even open?

Without thinking much, I left my bike leaning to the wall of the café and tried the handle of the antique shop's door. It was open. Some kind of a bell announced I had stepped into its somewhat dusty but magical world. Inside, there was nobody in sight.

It was funny to think that most people who bought these items would buy them without any knowledge of the memories these old objects held within. People would buy them as presents to someone they knew, or they would add them as decorative elements in their homes. A hint of a magic past in this otherwise so plastic postmodernity. Ignorant of the real past of the object they'd purchased, people would need to fill the gaps with their imagination.

This typewriter had been here for the entire time I had lived in the university town. No wonder. Who would buy it now, such a bulky machine, at a time when everyone wrote with a laptop? In my late twenties, I was actually an old-fashioned guy as I still preferred to write on my laptop rather than on a smartphone.

Were the lines written by the last owner of the typewriter? Perhaps a failed writer who had decided to flee from his inner empire and gave away his typewriter for a few dozen francs. Then what was that about the fly circus? Did he mean a flying circus or a flea circus?

I had escaped to the island many times when I was a child. The island was in the middle of a lake, and I seemed to remember every feature of it – the forest, the rock, the cave – although I must have imagined much of it. Most of the time, of course, I could flee to the island only within my mind, either imagining it or in my dreams, as I had no way to return to the lake after my grandfather had passed away.

My own story was merely a postmodern rant of references to the monomyth of mankind and its hero with a thousand faces. Joseph Campbell had written I should follow my bliss. Instead, I had seemed to be following the circus of fleas as they played their tricks, and at each turn, I would be nothing more than a lord of fleas.

Now the bell tinkled even though I saw nobody stepping into the shop.

"Are you satisfied yet?" asked a voice from the opposite direction, and I turned, startled, to stare at a dark corner of the shop, where a grey cloud of smoke seemed to slowly rise from an age-old armchair. "Michael in the Wonderland."

My curiosity overcame my fear and I stepped deeper into the shop, where the walls seemed to embrace me with the shelves filled with memory-laden objects. Old maps, laboratory tubes, ticking clocks, and skulls of unknown animals. On the only wall not covered by shelves, there was a painting with a lone rock with a lighthouse.

"How do you know my name?" I asked. Never mind he had mispronounced it.

I saw the outlines of the figure sitting there – a small, hunchbacked old man sporting a moustache and wearing a fez. He was smoking a hookah and flashing to me a broad but hearty smile.