Logic Games
by John McGroarty
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: A memory of childhood loss that won't go away.
_____________________________________________________________________
I try hard every day. Ever so hard. Every day of my life. Without fail. Without pause. I swear I do. For it’s your duty to try. To dig down in the dirt. To toss up the soil. To tunnel. Remember, wherever you are, that it’s your duty. Not to stop trying. Not even for one minute. I know that. I have no argument with that. Who could have a beef with that? Only a madman. Live your life and love the people around you. Think not of the past. Don’t look back. The simplest commandment. Accept. Accept your life and accept the past. Even when you never had one. Even when it was all an illusion. Everyone has a past you say. Not I. Life is a dream, a sagacious poet would say. At best. Don’t question too much. Accept your moment. And I do. I listen to the voice of command. That I do. My life is an ordinary one. I’m just a simple engineer. I do simple work. I make no pretence. I want nothing else now. Just my wife and my children. A little piece of happy land. I am striving. I am aware. Aware of the fragility. Of the fragility of form in time. I was born that way. Born out of my time. Born when my forms had already gone and new ones had taken their place. Somewhere there was a model, a plan, a scheme of things, sometime, place, and then there was a slip, an error in the reasoning. I became an engineer to find that error. I thought for a long time that I could. That I could build a machine, a time machine. A craft to go back. Go back and fix the mistake. Fix the mistake in the logic. I thought I had the power. To travel at infinite speed. To undo myself. Unmake me. Build it all up again. The way it should have been. But of course no-one is spared. And there is nothing to be done. Nothing except to live. There is no logic, no logic to this life. No machine to take you. No truth table can hold it. For all is p and then not p. The deep equation of life. Ǝp, then ¬p. And that’s it. Bernard told me that the last time I saw him. Don’t forget, Mark, he said, no truth table can contain this, I’m sorry if I deceived you and Tommy. I see him now, and Tommy, and Tommy’s mother and father, and my mother in her sadness and in her disappointment. All in a clear crystal tank. A hexagonal tank. That’s the way my mind paints it. Like the ones in the bee hives Bernard made us imagine. The hives accidental, the hexagons essential. Swimming around and around. And me, I can see myself in there, too. In a cosmic soup of a sea of a moment in the infinity of the logic game which has no rules and can be held in no truth table. And in the dark of the water the voice of command. Accept, accept, it says. Try hard. Get down and dig every day. Don’t you dare stop. Don’t you dare. It’s your duty. Wherever you are. Try hard every day. Ever so hard. Every day of your life.
Bernard was already an old man when I knew him. He must have been almost eighty. Wiry and strong still and tin-tin haired. In stripy shirt and braces. A pipe smoker. A man from another time. Come to save his daughter and his grandson. And, such was his largesse, to try, for a short time, to save me, too. His grandson’s melancholic wee friend. For he could see in me that I needed to be saved. That I was out there, away from the world. Floating too high. Caught up in the clouds. He came from across the sea. From Ireland. From where we all came. Once. We didn’t even know that Tommy’s mum was ill. She was a phantom of a woman to my teenage mind. An archetype. Freckled and red haired. Smiling and doing her duty. Like a force of nature. When the time came I didn’t even realise that she wasn’t there. That she had gone to hospital. That she wouldn’t be back. Tommy had an inkling. Uncertainty. Anxiety. But his still boyish mind could not hold such a fact as that. She’d gone for a short holiday. Back to Ireland. Soon she would be there. Making mince and potatoes and stew and dumplings and crumpets and rhubarb crumble and jam crust tarts and smiling through her freckles and waving her long curly red hair at the sky and the clouds and the darkness and the rain would disperse and we would drink tea and juice and laugh in the back garden in the hexagonal tank in the human hive of that short moment that goes and never comes back and I would go home feeling that I belonged somewhere splashing through the water of the burn through the acorn and the oak trees and give my mother a cuddle and go up to my room and sleep deep and long and dream that my life would be an ordinary happy one with a mother and father and a big brother and a big sister and a grandfather called Bernard who taught us about the mysteries of the ages of life and slipped us fifty pence coins which we saved and spent on football cards and punk rock singles. Bernard had been a mathematics teacher in a Belfast secondary school. During the war he had had an office job in intelligence. He made no contribution to victory. He had a second rate mathematical mind. He specialized in logic. Aristotle. Organon. He wrote a short book about Bertrand Russell’s Logical Atomism. People used to think about things like that. There was a copy in Tommy’s house but I haven’t been able to find another. It didn’t sell well and only had one print run. Decatalogued. It was the passion of Bernard’s life. That and Tommy’s mother. There is a photograph that used to sit on the telly that has stayed in my mind. It shows Bernard on VE day standing in a group of smiling Margaret Lockwoods in long drooping curls and Danny Kayes and Spencer Tracys in black and white uniforms. He has a sign round his neck which says “all clear” and is holding a little girl in one hand and a glass of beer in the other. It was the age of real hope. The dawn. And Bernard never lost his faith. Only at the very end when his wee girl let go his hand and didn’t come back from the hospital. When the breast cancer had taken her. When Tommy disappeared and didn’t speak for over a year. When we stopped climbing the trees and jumping the burn. When I was alone. Alone again. Always alone. Spinning round in circles to nowhere on my bike. When Tommy’s father took to the drink. When the world fell. Then he lost faith. Lost hope. Packed up and went back to Ireland.
I only went to the cinema twice when I was a child. My mother took Tommy and me on the number seventy-two bus into the city centre to see “Star Wars”. We queued for four hours in a line that snaked round the side of the Odeon and down a smelly lane. My mother bought us sausage rolls and iced doughnuts from Greggs. It rained. The other time was when Bernard took me and Tommy to see a film. He said it like that, we’re going to see “a film”. It was a Saturday and we walked into the town. Down Rutherglen Road, through Glasgow Green and up along Argyle Street. Bernard told us about facts and propositions and we couldn’t understand. He talked about a man called Socrates. He said that he was a fact but was neither true nor false. But when he was dead he was a proposition and he was true. And when he was not dead he was not true. Then he was silent for a long time. Later I found out that that day he had heard the truth about his daughter. We saw “The Spy Who Loved Me”. “A film”. James Bond. Keeping all our secrets safe tonight. I’ll never forget that film. The cinema was empty and I sat between Tommy and Bernard. The wee brother. We had popcorn. James Bond is making love to a gorgeous bird in an isolated mountain cabin when he receives a message on his expensive gold watch. He gets up and gets his ski suit on and makes for the door. The bird remonstrates, I need you, James, she pleads. England needs me, says Roger Moore. Tommy and I moved uncomfortably in our seats at that. The Commies had come to rub James out. To rub England out. Then the chase on skis. James Bond finally shoots off a precipice and falls and falls and falls for what seems like an eternity and then, just when his splatterful end is nigh, he opens a parachute and glides safely away from his assailants. The parachute is in the form of a Union Jack. Me and Tommy booed and hooted till our lungs would burst. We threw popcorn at the screen. I glanced at Bernard but he wasn’t there. He was focusing on an emergency light in the corner, a green light, trying to make something out of the dark particles. He turned and took my hand, remembered, and then let it go and grabbed Tommy’s hand across my legs. He looked at him and there were tears in his eyes. Put the hope in Tommy. Hold his hand tight. Don’t lose your faith in the better future. Tommy kept booing at James Bond. Started to stamp his feet. Looked straight ahead at the screen. For Tommy knew then. Bernard said nothing, just kept holding his hand. Squeezing it in his old man’s gnarled fist. Nobody does it better, the female chantress went on the screen, makes me feel sad for the rest. I’ll never ever forget that day. James Bond, the long walk into the town, how the sun fell through the trees on Glasgow Green, the dark waters of the Clyde, Socrates, who was a fact but not true, Carly Simon, Agent Triple X, Bernard with his eyes full of tears, the silence, the popcorn, the emergency lights, and the beginning of the end of Tommy’s childhood.
Then there were two months. Two months in the rending it was. Bernard walked with us to Cathkin Braes or up over the Bankie field after school and told us about the waves. How a dictionary could never describe the blue of the sky or the whiteness of the clouds. About the cirrus and the stratus and the cumulus. How red was the greatest and blue the sharpest. How we could travel around the universe and come back hardly a day older than we were then. And that words, or symbols, were not enough. Symbols were what Bernard called words. One day he got all mystic and told us about his master symbol, the one that makes all civilized life anywhere possible. “All good life” was the term he used. He called that symbol “Love”. But it was too late. For me. And for Tommy. He was already gone. I couldn’t go with him. Not yet. He disappeared. He stopped jumping the burn and climbing the trees. Put away the things of the child. I saw him on scheme corners smoking and mocking everything. Jeering at the world. He started to prowl the scheme at night and break into cars. Symbolic, primitive, acts they were. Revenge. Killing of the gods. A lashing out. I understood it well. Understood it the way I never understood Bernard’s waves, his either ors, his ands, his if thens, his p’s and q’s and his Socrates. The way not some was the opposite of all. His subjects and his predicates. His inductions and deductions. But I understood Tommy. Understood it, believed it, and wished and desired it not all at the same time. Tommy was caught shoplifting. Some stupid toys that he was already beyond. He stuffed them up inside his coat and ran out the emergency exit right into the arms of the security guards. I think he wanted to be caught. He wanted his mum to be angry. To give him a row. Punish and then forgive. The shop didn’t press any charges but Tommy was grounded for two weeks. I would cycle by his house and look up and try to see in the windows but it seemed that the house was already abandoned. I caught chicken pox and couldn’t go out for two weeks and one Sunday morning, after the fever had lifted and the scabs cleared, Tommy came to the door the way he used to. My mother shouted up to me, it’s Tommy, she said. It’s Tommy, Mark, aren’t you coming down? We went round to the burn and I couldn’t believe it. The council had cut down all the acorn trees that ran along the edge of the bank where Tommy’s house was. They were all chopped up into chunks. Felled and flung into the burn. We didn’t say anything. We splashed through the water and started to jump madly from one log to another chasing each other around in circles. We ran and jumped and hopped and spat and spun for an hour in silence. Then we collapsed on the bank panting and sweating. I looked up and saw Bernard and Tommy’s dad come round the corner. They shouted down to Tommy but we couldn’t hear them. We got up and chased each other around some more. Eventually Tommy’s dad clambered down the bank and took hold of Tommy. Come on, son, he said, it’s time. Suddenly Tommy gave up. Went limp. He climbed up the bank with his dad. He didn’t look at me. I followed them up the bank but I could only go so far. Bernard stopped me. He spoke some words. Ran his fingers through my hair and turned. I watched them disappear into a taxi. I went back down to the trees and began to jump from log to log. I felt that something had been lost somewhere. I tried to find it. Tried hard. Ever so hard. After half an hour I was exhausted and l fell and skint my leg. There was blood soaking into my jeans. And little boy tears flooding my eyes and blocking my throat and my nose. The happiness I had found for a fleeting second had gone down the hole of memory, the place where all truly human things go. I climbed out of the burn, looked up to where Tommy and his family had gone, and decided to go home to my own house.
I grew up, as all little boys do, even sad ones like me and Tommy. I don’t know why I’m remembering all this now. It’s so long ago and the world has changed so much. Maybe it’s because I need to be sad sometimes in order to sublimate, be reborn and go on with my life. To keep looking for answers. I don’t think anyone knows about these sorts of things. Tommy disappeared from my small child radar. I saw him sometimes with his crowd. I passed his house many times but nobody was home. There was a silence where there had once been so much laughter. I saw his father speeding around the scheme, keeping up appearances in his lumber jacket and his stiff swift stride. Every year he greyed more and his step got less quick and then I didn’t see him anymore. One time as an adult I saw Tommy in Glasgow Central Station. I went to walk up to him and say hello but stopped. He was waiting under the clock and looking up at the train destination board. I watched from a distance. He didn’t see me. He still looked the same. Just like his mother. His red bopped hair and freckles and lithe frame. Finally a woman came up to him and they walked off together. They didn’t look happy and I think they had an argument. I followed them. They went down a platform and got on a train. It was going to Irvine. A new town. Just before they got on the train they held hands. She looked nice. I hope you are happy, Tommy. Christ you deserve it. I hope your girl makes you happy. She looked like a nice woman, just like your mother was. Last week I took a morning off work and took the dog for a walk around the town. The Bankie field is houses now but you can still go up to the second field and look down over the city. On the way back I went through Overtoun Park and I stopped at the rocks with the faces in them. I swear I saw Bernard’s face in there. That night I had a dream. I was running around wildly searching for something. It was an anxiety dream. I know because when I woke up my teeth were aching from the grinding I had given them. An old man grabbed me by the arm and made me stand still. He took my hand. I think it was Bernard. I couldn’t make out his face but it was his voice. He whispered to me that he had been wrong. That p is not all there is. That there are many p’s. An infinite number of truth tables. Many chances to be happy. My name is Magis, he said. And Sigma. Constantly changing. Swirling round in circles. That Sigma is the truth, the answer. The Summation. The gathering in of all states. That in Sigma is all in the end, all that has been, will be, and all, Tommy, that could have been until the great reunion of all shall come. I hope that you’re happy, Tommy. I hope that you’re striving. Every day. Just like me. Digging deep in the soil. Putting down other roots. It’s your duty. Accept. Don’t look back. Try to live. Follow the command. We cannot know or understand anything. Only in the Summation shall we see. Only Sigma is the end of all our sorrowful logic games. Go and live, Tommy. Don’t you dare stop. Try hard. Try very hard. Every day, every day of your life.
Swearwords: None.
Description: A memory of childhood loss that won't go away.
_____________________________________________________________________
I try hard every day. Ever so hard. Every day of my life. Without fail. Without pause. I swear I do. For it’s your duty to try. To dig down in the dirt. To toss up the soil. To tunnel. Remember, wherever you are, that it’s your duty. Not to stop trying. Not even for one minute. I know that. I have no argument with that. Who could have a beef with that? Only a madman. Live your life and love the people around you. Think not of the past. Don’t look back. The simplest commandment. Accept. Accept your life and accept the past. Even when you never had one. Even when it was all an illusion. Everyone has a past you say. Not I. Life is a dream, a sagacious poet would say. At best. Don’t question too much. Accept your moment. And I do. I listen to the voice of command. That I do. My life is an ordinary one. I’m just a simple engineer. I do simple work. I make no pretence. I want nothing else now. Just my wife and my children. A little piece of happy land. I am striving. I am aware. Aware of the fragility. Of the fragility of form in time. I was born that way. Born out of my time. Born when my forms had already gone and new ones had taken their place. Somewhere there was a model, a plan, a scheme of things, sometime, place, and then there was a slip, an error in the reasoning. I became an engineer to find that error. I thought for a long time that I could. That I could build a machine, a time machine. A craft to go back. Go back and fix the mistake. Fix the mistake in the logic. I thought I had the power. To travel at infinite speed. To undo myself. Unmake me. Build it all up again. The way it should have been. But of course no-one is spared. And there is nothing to be done. Nothing except to live. There is no logic, no logic to this life. No machine to take you. No truth table can hold it. For all is p and then not p. The deep equation of life. Ǝp, then ¬p. And that’s it. Bernard told me that the last time I saw him. Don’t forget, Mark, he said, no truth table can contain this, I’m sorry if I deceived you and Tommy. I see him now, and Tommy, and Tommy’s mother and father, and my mother in her sadness and in her disappointment. All in a clear crystal tank. A hexagonal tank. That’s the way my mind paints it. Like the ones in the bee hives Bernard made us imagine. The hives accidental, the hexagons essential. Swimming around and around. And me, I can see myself in there, too. In a cosmic soup of a sea of a moment in the infinity of the logic game which has no rules and can be held in no truth table. And in the dark of the water the voice of command. Accept, accept, it says. Try hard. Get down and dig every day. Don’t you dare stop. Don’t you dare. It’s your duty. Wherever you are. Try hard every day. Ever so hard. Every day of your life.
Bernard was already an old man when I knew him. He must have been almost eighty. Wiry and strong still and tin-tin haired. In stripy shirt and braces. A pipe smoker. A man from another time. Come to save his daughter and his grandson. And, such was his largesse, to try, for a short time, to save me, too. His grandson’s melancholic wee friend. For he could see in me that I needed to be saved. That I was out there, away from the world. Floating too high. Caught up in the clouds. He came from across the sea. From Ireland. From where we all came. Once. We didn’t even know that Tommy’s mum was ill. She was a phantom of a woman to my teenage mind. An archetype. Freckled and red haired. Smiling and doing her duty. Like a force of nature. When the time came I didn’t even realise that she wasn’t there. That she had gone to hospital. That she wouldn’t be back. Tommy had an inkling. Uncertainty. Anxiety. But his still boyish mind could not hold such a fact as that. She’d gone for a short holiday. Back to Ireland. Soon she would be there. Making mince and potatoes and stew and dumplings and crumpets and rhubarb crumble and jam crust tarts and smiling through her freckles and waving her long curly red hair at the sky and the clouds and the darkness and the rain would disperse and we would drink tea and juice and laugh in the back garden in the hexagonal tank in the human hive of that short moment that goes and never comes back and I would go home feeling that I belonged somewhere splashing through the water of the burn through the acorn and the oak trees and give my mother a cuddle and go up to my room and sleep deep and long and dream that my life would be an ordinary happy one with a mother and father and a big brother and a big sister and a grandfather called Bernard who taught us about the mysteries of the ages of life and slipped us fifty pence coins which we saved and spent on football cards and punk rock singles. Bernard had been a mathematics teacher in a Belfast secondary school. During the war he had had an office job in intelligence. He made no contribution to victory. He had a second rate mathematical mind. He specialized in logic. Aristotle. Organon. He wrote a short book about Bertrand Russell’s Logical Atomism. People used to think about things like that. There was a copy in Tommy’s house but I haven’t been able to find another. It didn’t sell well and only had one print run. Decatalogued. It was the passion of Bernard’s life. That and Tommy’s mother. There is a photograph that used to sit on the telly that has stayed in my mind. It shows Bernard on VE day standing in a group of smiling Margaret Lockwoods in long drooping curls and Danny Kayes and Spencer Tracys in black and white uniforms. He has a sign round his neck which says “all clear” and is holding a little girl in one hand and a glass of beer in the other. It was the age of real hope. The dawn. And Bernard never lost his faith. Only at the very end when his wee girl let go his hand and didn’t come back from the hospital. When the breast cancer had taken her. When Tommy disappeared and didn’t speak for over a year. When we stopped climbing the trees and jumping the burn. When I was alone. Alone again. Always alone. Spinning round in circles to nowhere on my bike. When Tommy’s father took to the drink. When the world fell. Then he lost faith. Lost hope. Packed up and went back to Ireland.
I only went to the cinema twice when I was a child. My mother took Tommy and me on the number seventy-two bus into the city centre to see “Star Wars”. We queued for four hours in a line that snaked round the side of the Odeon and down a smelly lane. My mother bought us sausage rolls and iced doughnuts from Greggs. It rained. The other time was when Bernard took me and Tommy to see a film. He said it like that, we’re going to see “a film”. It was a Saturday and we walked into the town. Down Rutherglen Road, through Glasgow Green and up along Argyle Street. Bernard told us about facts and propositions and we couldn’t understand. He talked about a man called Socrates. He said that he was a fact but was neither true nor false. But when he was dead he was a proposition and he was true. And when he was not dead he was not true. Then he was silent for a long time. Later I found out that that day he had heard the truth about his daughter. We saw “The Spy Who Loved Me”. “A film”. James Bond. Keeping all our secrets safe tonight. I’ll never forget that film. The cinema was empty and I sat between Tommy and Bernard. The wee brother. We had popcorn. James Bond is making love to a gorgeous bird in an isolated mountain cabin when he receives a message on his expensive gold watch. He gets up and gets his ski suit on and makes for the door. The bird remonstrates, I need you, James, she pleads. England needs me, says Roger Moore. Tommy and I moved uncomfortably in our seats at that. The Commies had come to rub James out. To rub England out. Then the chase on skis. James Bond finally shoots off a precipice and falls and falls and falls for what seems like an eternity and then, just when his splatterful end is nigh, he opens a parachute and glides safely away from his assailants. The parachute is in the form of a Union Jack. Me and Tommy booed and hooted till our lungs would burst. We threw popcorn at the screen. I glanced at Bernard but he wasn’t there. He was focusing on an emergency light in the corner, a green light, trying to make something out of the dark particles. He turned and took my hand, remembered, and then let it go and grabbed Tommy’s hand across my legs. He looked at him and there were tears in his eyes. Put the hope in Tommy. Hold his hand tight. Don’t lose your faith in the better future. Tommy kept booing at James Bond. Started to stamp his feet. Looked straight ahead at the screen. For Tommy knew then. Bernard said nothing, just kept holding his hand. Squeezing it in his old man’s gnarled fist. Nobody does it better, the female chantress went on the screen, makes me feel sad for the rest. I’ll never ever forget that day. James Bond, the long walk into the town, how the sun fell through the trees on Glasgow Green, the dark waters of the Clyde, Socrates, who was a fact but not true, Carly Simon, Agent Triple X, Bernard with his eyes full of tears, the silence, the popcorn, the emergency lights, and the beginning of the end of Tommy’s childhood.
Then there were two months. Two months in the rending it was. Bernard walked with us to Cathkin Braes or up over the Bankie field after school and told us about the waves. How a dictionary could never describe the blue of the sky or the whiteness of the clouds. About the cirrus and the stratus and the cumulus. How red was the greatest and blue the sharpest. How we could travel around the universe and come back hardly a day older than we were then. And that words, or symbols, were not enough. Symbols were what Bernard called words. One day he got all mystic and told us about his master symbol, the one that makes all civilized life anywhere possible. “All good life” was the term he used. He called that symbol “Love”. But it was too late. For me. And for Tommy. He was already gone. I couldn’t go with him. Not yet. He disappeared. He stopped jumping the burn and climbing the trees. Put away the things of the child. I saw him on scheme corners smoking and mocking everything. Jeering at the world. He started to prowl the scheme at night and break into cars. Symbolic, primitive, acts they were. Revenge. Killing of the gods. A lashing out. I understood it well. Understood it the way I never understood Bernard’s waves, his either ors, his ands, his if thens, his p’s and q’s and his Socrates. The way not some was the opposite of all. His subjects and his predicates. His inductions and deductions. But I understood Tommy. Understood it, believed it, and wished and desired it not all at the same time. Tommy was caught shoplifting. Some stupid toys that he was already beyond. He stuffed them up inside his coat and ran out the emergency exit right into the arms of the security guards. I think he wanted to be caught. He wanted his mum to be angry. To give him a row. Punish and then forgive. The shop didn’t press any charges but Tommy was grounded for two weeks. I would cycle by his house and look up and try to see in the windows but it seemed that the house was already abandoned. I caught chicken pox and couldn’t go out for two weeks and one Sunday morning, after the fever had lifted and the scabs cleared, Tommy came to the door the way he used to. My mother shouted up to me, it’s Tommy, she said. It’s Tommy, Mark, aren’t you coming down? We went round to the burn and I couldn’t believe it. The council had cut down all the acorn trees that ran along the edge of the bank where Tommy’s house was. They were all chopped up into chunks. Felled and flung into the burn. We didn’t say anything. We splashed through the water and started to jump madly from one log to another chasing each other around in circles. We ran and jumped and hopped and spat and spun for an hour in silence. Then we collapsed on the bank panting and sweating. I looked up and saw Bernard and Tommy’s dad come round the corner. They shouted down to Tommy but we couldn’t hear them. We got up and chased each other around some more. Eventually Tommy’s dad clambered down the bank and took hold of Tommy. Come on, son, he said, it’s time. Suddenly Tommy gave up. Went limp. He climbed up the bank with his dad. He didn’t look at me. I followed them up the bank but I could only go so far. Bernard stopped me. He spoke some words. Ran his fingers through my hair and turned. I watched them disappear into a taxi. I went back down to the trees and began to jump from log to log. I felt that something had been lost somewhere. I tried to find it. Tried hard. Ever so hard. After half an hour I was exhausted and l fell and skint my leg. There was blood soaking into my jeans. And little boy tears flooding my eyes and blocking my throat and my nose. The happiness I had found for a fleeting second had gone down the hole of memory, the place where all truly human things go. I climbed out of the burn, looked up to where Tommy and his family had gone, and decided to go home to my own house.
I grew up, as all little boys do, even sad ones like me and Tommy. I don’t know why I’m remembering all this now. It’s so long ago and the world has changed so much. Maybe it’s because I need to be sad sometimes in order to sublimate, be reborn and go on with my life. To keep looking for answers. I don’t think anyone knows about these sorts of things. Tommy disappeared from my small child radar. I saw him sometimes with his crowd. I passed his house many times but nobody was home. There was a silence where there had once been so much laughter. I saw his father speeding around the scheme, keeping up appearances in his lumber jacket and his stiff swift stride. Every year he greyed more and his step got less quick and then I didn’t see him anymore. One time as an adult I saw Tommy in Glasgow Central Station. I went to walk up to him and say hello but stopped. He was waiting under the clock and looking up at the train destination board. I watched from a distance. He didn’t see me. He still looked the same. Just like his mother. His red bopped hair and freckles and lithe frame. Finally a woman came up to him and they walked off together. They didn’t look happy and I think they had an argument. I followed them. They went down a platform and got on a train. It was going to Irvine. A new town. Just before they got on the train they held hands. She looked nice. I hope you are happy, Tommy. Christ you deserve it. I hope your girl makes you happy. She looked like a nice woman, just like your mother was. Last week I took a morning off work and took the dog for a walk around the town. The Bankie field is houses now but you can still go up to the second field and look down over the city. On the way back I went through Overtoun Park and I stopped at the rocks with the faces in them. I swear I saw Bernard’s face in there. That night I had a dream. I was running around wildly searching for something. It was an anxiety dream. I know because when I woke up my teeth were aching from the grinding I had given them. An old man grabbed me by the arm and made me stand still. He took my hand. I think it was Bernard. I couldn’t make out his face but it was his voice. He whispered to me that he had been wrong. That p is not all there is. That there are many p’s. An infinite number of truth tables. Many chances to be happy. My name is Magis, he said. And Sigma. Constantly changing. Swirling round in circles. That Sigma is the truth, the answer. The Summation. The gathering in of all states. That in Sigma is all in the end, all that has been, will be, and all, Tommy, that could have been until the great reunion of all shall come. I hope that you’re happy, Tommy. I hope that you’re striving. Every day. Just like me. Digging deep in the soil. Putting down other roots. It’s your duty. Accept. Don’t look back. Try to live. Follow the command. We cannot know or understand anything. Only in the Summation shall we see. Only Sigma is the end of all our sorrowful logic games. Go and live, Tommy. Don’t you dare stop. Try hard. Try very hard. Every day, every day of your life.