The Literal Gnome

By Howard Change

An evening of rich food, booze and a night spent writhing around the bed sheets, covered in an icy sweat. I awaken in the early hours of the morning, damp and prickly, now conscious of last night's excesses. Soft, the light through yonder bedroom window breaks, or whatever. Any light feels hard to me this morning. My eyes are kind of whited out, the way that a car windscreen flicks to opaque when catching a direct blast of bright winter sunshine. Something has changed for good, I rub my eyes and still it's all white. The room is white - the colourful diagonal pattern of the wallpaper, bleached to white, the grass outside the window, the sky, the houses at the end of the garden, all white. It's as if a fog - both inside and out - has covered everything evenly, leaving just a hard black outline, like a crude drawing. Even my reflection in the mirror hasn't escaped it. I spray an aerosol deodorant: a series of dots, a descending grey scale as they disappear in the air. I'm not shocked, at least I don't think I am. The shiver running down my backbone and the kind of hole in my stomach are classic signs of anxiety. I'm going to run downstairs to the telephone. On my way down I pass a small man. A small man, who I've never seen before, on the stairs doing something, in my house. He has a huge pencil in his hand, turned pointy end upwards. The blunt end has an eraser attached and he is rubbing away the outline of my staircase. "What the hell are you doing?" I say. "Rubbing." "Rubbing? Rubbing out my stairs, but I won't be able to get back upstairs if you continue." "And a good thing too," he said looking me directly in the eye and wagging his finger at me, "if you're starting again." What he's said doesn't make any more or less sense than him being here in the first place with everything at his hand, now resembling a line drawing. "Last night, you came to see me, while you were sleeping..." I stop him there. "Nonsense, nonsense and more nonsense" I'm covering my ears with my hands as I speak. "You said, if you will allow my to continue, quote: 'I need to start again, I've made far too many mistakes, I need a clean sheet.' So that's what I'm doing. Your life is one part-filled drawing, so I'm erasing it, giving you, quite literally, a clean sheet of paper with which to start again. If you so wish." Had my mouth dropped open any further then I'm sure that my head would have split in two. "That's just a figure of speech, 'a clean sheet'." "Oh-ho, there is no such thing to me, my boy. I'm what's known as a Literal Gnome, whatever you say to me, that's the way it will be." "But I was drunk, feeling sorry for myself!" "Well you've no need to feel sorry for yourself any more, soon you will no longer exist." Why had I been saying anything to him at all, let alone allowing him to come to me in a dream? I remembered eating lots of rich food, getting drunk, sleeping fitfully, then...that was it! The Garden Centre. I picked up a gift for Granny, a Gnome to add to her collection. A particularly ugly Gnome. It's him, the little man, I bought him yesterday! "If it's not what you want you should be careful what you ask for, my boy." "So, a clean sheet," I'll face this, like a man, while I still am one, "What does it mean?" "Like I say, you don't exist, everything gone. Start again." "But I won't exist, who starts again?" "You don't know much do you? Look. All your worldly goods, all gone, yes?" "Ok" "Well, they still exist, they've been transformed into gold, using sunlight. The colours have been used to create a new rainbow. Your previous life is the crock of gold at the end of that rainbow, ready for some deserving soul to discover." "A rainbow?" "Yes, you didn't know where rainbows came from, dear me! Look, you as a worldly being will be rubbed out, but your essence, the thing that created your personality, will still be around." "Where?" "Nowhere!" "Nowhere, where's that?" "It's a place, just like Where, but it's a place with nothing in it. My good old literal clean sheet." He starts rubbing again, "And when your essence has decided what it will become, that's what it will become and it'll be drawn and coloured-in using the colours of another rainbow made from someone else's hard done by, used up, exhausted life. There's only so much colour available in the universe you know." The Literal Gnome explains that Somewhere is the Where that we think it is because we are familiar with it. We fill in the blanks, make it seem like Somewhere. In reality, it's no more Somewhere than Nowhere is. I close my eyes and can see colour and depth in my mind. I try to imagine that it's not real, that it is an imaginary place, my memory of the way things were. When I open my eyes, I want it to be like when you finish reading a book or when you leave a cinema and return to the bright outside world, I want to be back in my comfortable and familiar home, but maybe just that little bit wiser and more thoughtful. It doesn't happen. "That's not going to work, my boy," said the Gnome reading my thoughts and blowing some crumbs of the rubbing-out away, "you're here now. Nowhere." Now the shock does start to set in. Never going back! A blank sheet. What will I be when I am just essence? I am standing on the door mat and the postman has slotted some letters through my letter box. The letters have become transparent, no longer paper as I used to know it. Words have disappeared, nothing more than someone's vague idea, a consciousness floating around then 'poof' I can see each individual letter disappear, a cloud of pollen on a summers day. One envelope stands out as it still has colour, a bright orange, almost glowing, it looks so strange. I open the orange envelope, inside there is a yellow piece of paper with the words, "It was worth it, give it another try!" written in long, thin streaks of purple ink. I feel compelled to show Literal Gnome. He doesn't seem all that surprised to see this burst of colour appear in the white rubbed out world, "Ha! It's arrived, then, often does!" Yet more mystery on this strange day, "May I ask what has arrived? Doesn't seem to say much to me." The gnome looked incredulous, his eyebrows making perfect crescents beneath the brim of his pointy hat, "Surely it says everything, my boy, surely it says everything." "I, I, don't follow you." "It's from the rainbow," he swished his arm and an arc of paint left the brush he was holding, "a part of you couldn't let go." He span round twice. All I remember feeling was warm and content, perhaps I passed out. I could smell a vague odour of rubber, mixed with human hair and decades of dust making my sensitive nose twitch. When I opened my eyes, I was face to face with the heavily patterned pub-style carpet that covered the steps of my staircase. I'd never much cared for it, but today, the mixture of gaudy colours had really grown on me after all the whiteness. I'd been woken from my slumbers half-way up the stairs by a bright flash of golden orange sunlight, tinged with violet and a vivid egg yolk yellow. In one hand an empty bottle of wine with a whiff of vinegary remnants, in the other an absolutely ugly gnome, the bugger I'd bought for Granny yesterday. What on Earth... I put the Gnome outside the house in the front garden and as I walked forwards into my street, ready to make my way into the warmth of the sunrise and the unexpected adventures of this new day, I turned to look at him and smiled. I swear the Gnome winked back at me.