The Inaction Man Read online

  Chapter 5

  Bum Wars

  Carrying his new found friend and ally, Symbol, our superhero and his two-wheeled assistant roamed the night time streets of the Latin Quarter. Inaction Man was proud of Symbol and wrapped his arms through the bike’s frame, displaying her to the world like a proud general might display his tanks. However, in spite of all her attributes, Symbol was a side-kick and not a bona fide superhero. She lacked special powers, for one thing, and she lacked blood and bone, for another.

  Inaction Man studied the gutters in his quest to discover the second defender of the Earth. On Inaction Man’s instructions, Symbol looked to the Heavens, in case a shooting star should propel the other superhero earthwards.

  They received some strange looks from passers-by, who questioned why a bedraggled bum was carrying a rusty old bicycle with a broken front wheel. They were even more disturbed by the snippets of conversation the vagabond appeared to be having with himself. They heard two distinct voices: one guttural and broken, but erudite; and the other soft and feminine, but facetious.

  “So, Inaction Man, would I be right in saying that you don’t really know what your name means yet? That you’re only guessing?” Symbol asked.

  “No answer have I found. I have postulated various theories, and shouted them to the stars on clear nights, but the stars remain silent.”

  “The stars come out at night but they don’t say much. Tell me this, then. How will you know you know? I mean, how will you know you know what your name means? You might just think you know, you know?” Symbol asked, its back wheel purring in ponder.

  “Do not bate me with epistemological circumlocution. You are the Symbol, not a sophist. The moment of revelation will come like a thunderbolt. When you are struck by lightning, you know it! This blissful moment of clarity will be the light that shows me that my life until that point had been darkness.”

  “And this star shock will tell what you have to do as well, will it?” Symbol said.

  “Yes, only then shall I know my place in the greater scheme of things, my stitches in the fabric of the universe, my place in the cosmic order.”

  “And till then, what?”

  “Until then am I doomed to wander the night, vilified by mortal man and hunted by monsters. An eternal seeker on a quest he does not truly understand. A nameless wanderer,” Inaction Man said, with a sigh.

  “And where will we wander tonight?”

  “It is best to avoid all decisions, my all-too inquisitive Symbol. A decision is perilously close to an action, and all action is, I suspect, inherently evil. I never go anywhere intentionally. I merely walk and walk, on and on, and then I look up and find myself somewhere. And with something that must be done. The fates carry me and present my missions. Destiny decrees destination.”

  “So where will destiny take us tonight?” the bike asked.

  “Somewhere. Be it here or be it there, it is of little consequence, just so long as I haven’t decided to go there. I find myself where I am, and where I am is where I am meant to be. We must flow with the river and not decide to fight against its flow. This is one of the precepts of the philosophy of inaction: Go with the flow and flow where you go.”

  Symbol was having difficulty following Inaction Man’s logic. Being a bicycle, it was an inherently functional creature. It had little time for philosophy, or abstracts of any kind, for that matter. But in spite of its confusion, Symbol was happy. To be addressed at all was delightful, and still a novelty to a bicycle used to being ridden from A to B, without so much as a polite request beforehand or a kind word of thanks afterwards. The bike lost itself in the warm arms of Inaction Man and its frame purred. Being carried rather than carrying, for the first time in Symbol’s life, the bike hoped this journey would go on forever; that Inaction Man would carry Symbol into the light, into an eternal dawn.

  Shortly afterwards, in a dimly lit backstreet, a bird dropped a blessing on Inaction Man’s head. He felt it, smelt it and tasted it, just to be sure it was a sign that this was the locus in quo. The texture and taste left no doubt and our hero waited for an opportunity to use his powers. To better conceal himself, he crouched in the shadow of a doorway and hugged Symbol under his overcoat, or as much of her as possible.

  Within an hour, Inaction Man saw a golden opportunity to promote inaction. On the other side of the road, two tramps were attempting to start a fight, but both were already far too inebriated for it to amount to much. They tried to punch each other, but both of them were swaying so much that they only succeeded in punching the air.

  Their conversation was loud but incoherent. They were from Marseilles, but I shall render the vernacular in an equally obscure English accent, which is to say, an Irish accent.

  “Dat’s enough shite outta you, Vlad. C’mere to me, ya dirty bollix, an’ I’ll feckin do ya!”

  “Do me, will you, Estra? Gone and get away with you. I’ll rearrange your face for ya, you dirty sheep shaggin’ dipso. I’ll f**king do you for dat!”

  “Not iffin I do you first!”

  The frequent uses of the word ‘do’ alarmed Inaction Man immediately, primed as he was to prevent anyone doing anything. He decided to intervene in the melee before things went any further. Who knew what might happen if the insanity of action was allowed to run its course in this situation?

  “Brothers, end this wickedness at once!” Inaction Man commanded, as he stood up and staggered from the doorway, emerging under the light of an orange streetlamp.

  “Do what!” one of the man spat out.

  He turned to face Inaction Man, which caused his punch to miss its target entirely. He lost his balance and the man who threw the punch was thrown to the ground by the weight of his own swing. Felled by his own punch, he groaned in the gutter. If the poetic justice of his fall occurred to him, his cursing did not show it.

  “Don’t do. Be,” Inaction Man said and opened his arms, or would have done, if they had not been entwined in the frame of Symbol.

  “Be what?” the other drunk said, his voice twisted by confusion and anger.

  “Heed the prime directive of the philosophy of inaction and act not. All evil comes from action, all good things flow from inactivity. I repeat the dictate: don’t do, simply be.”

  “Get away to f**k with you, ya shitehawk. We’ll do you, mister. Do you up good and proper.”

  “Yeah, and after we do you, we’re gonna stick that banjacked bike up yer arse and go for a ride on yer bollox!”

  The two drunks forgot all about their previous animosity and incipient altercation, and now seemed to be united in their hatred of Inaction Man and Symbol. They walked towards our heroes, all lumbering menace.

  Inaction Man tried to appeal to their better natures.

  “Brethren! Why do you abuse me so? Can you not see I am a bringer of peace, a force for good? Why –”

  Inaction Man realised that further reasoning would be futile when one of the tramps picked up a nearby rock and threw it at him. It bounced off Symbol’s handlebars and crashed into an adjacent car. This triggering an alarm and left an ominous crack in the windshield. Inaction Man gasped and wondered how long it would be before demons emerged from this crack.

  The two vagabonds also wanted to escape but for different reasons.

  “Look what you’ve gone and done, Vlad! The feckin’ police will be after us now. If they bang us up we’ll never find Godot. The fecker owes me a fiver!”

  “Quit yis yer yappin’ and just leg it!”

  Inaction Man was also concerned about the imminent arrival of the police officers, since so many of them were actually shape changers. He decided to beat a judicious and hasty retreat. He ran from the area, carrying his wounded friend, Symbol.

  It is far more difficult for a man to carry a bicycle than it is for a bicycle to carry a man and Inaction Man was soon out of breath. His run became a jog and fell to a stride and then descended into a slow walk, with much wheezing, coughing and sputtering.

  At
midnight, Inaction Man and Symbol sat silently on the pavement outside the church of St Michel. Inaction Man inspected his companion and found a small dent in its handlebars. It was the bike’s first war wound and he told Symbol to wear the injury with pride. One day a ribbon would hang from the handlebar, and suspended from it would dangle a medal for bravery. Symbol was delighted to hear this and asked many questions concerning the ribbon and the nature of the honours she would receive.

  Inaction Man painted a beautiful picture of the future, with garlands galore and all manner of processions, but he kept a close eye out for spectres and other dark forces that might have been released through the crack in the car’s windshield. Nothing would please a demon more than the irony of destroying Inaction Man through a crack of Symbol’s inadvertent creation.

  Since a moving target is more difficult to hit, and a reflected one even more so, Inaction Man carried Symbol past the shop front windows of Boulevard St Michel. The designer brand mannequins watched the defenders of the Earth pass by and cheered them on.

  Inaction Man told Symbol of the many adventures he has had since his moment of revelation. Many rocks that had been hurled at him, many fists had been laid into him; and perhaps most wounding of all, he spoke of the many jeers and taunts that had been levelled at him by a cruel and uncaring world, oblivious to the role he played in their salvation.

  “I am Inaction Man, but no-one knows my name, and no-one knows my pain,” he said to Symbol, as a grey dawn rose over the City of Light.

  “I am Symbol. With a gammy wheel and a dented bar, I’ll still go far,” she replied.

  Bedding down for the day under some bushes near the river, Inaction Man and Symbol left the real world and entering the world of dreams. It was a world Inaction Man felt much safer in, a world whose rules and regulations he had a greater part in creating. Just before falling asleep, he spoke of this sense of ownership.

  “We are the creators in the dream world, protagonists freed from antagonists. ‘All men are heroes in dreams,’ as Freud has shown. In dreams, we are free. Dreams also carry messages, borne on psychic winds, from other worlds and dimensions. It is possible, loyal Symbol, that the meaning of my name may be revealed in a dream.”

  “Sweet dreams then,” Symbol said.

  “We shall interpret our dreams at dusk.”

  Symbol slept in under a minute. Torpor is an easy state for bicycles to achieve, but this night she dreamt she was flying, with Inaction Man at the handle bars, careering left and right through warm fluffy clouds. Inaction Man’s dream had an altogether darker feel to it, something far more gothic and far more prophetic.