(diaryland) November 23, 2009 - 11:04 a.m.

At a party on Saturday night, I told everyone that I had had sex with a statue in the novel I was writing. Thinking back, that was a very weird thing to say. On that note, the following is the next chapter of my Novembral Novel.

Chapter the Sixteenth

Vaughn Bourbon looked at me through the opening in the door.

�About motherfucking time,� he said. �Motherfuck.�

So, I opened the door a bit wider and let him in. Sure, he was completely different, but I knew it was him. Sure, he was no longer a paraplegic for some reason, and despite losing an ear and several fingers recently, they were back on in the exact right spots they were supposed to be, even the ones I hadn�t seen go back into the fountain, and it looked like he had never lost them. But it was him.

He was really, really tall now. By that, I mean he was the same tallness before but now he wasn�t all folded up in a wheelchair like an A1 size piece of paper crammed into a C4 envelope (if you�ve ever worked as an administrative assistant, you�ll know what I mean). He was especially tall because just before I opened the door a crack, he was leaning on it with his arms above his head, pounding his fists on the panelling.

Vaughn lunged inside. You sort of have to when you�re presented with a normal-sized doorway and you�re freakishly tall.

�Damn, you�re even shorter than usual,� he said. �I wonder why.�

�Maybe it�s because you�re standing up,� I pointed out. I was also not wearing shoes, which subtracted about three centimetres from my already piddling height.

�Oh, shit, yeah, I didn�t realise,� he said in wonderment. He looked down and lifted one leg off the ground reverently.

�You have got to be kidding,� I said.

�Well, I was a walking around kinda guy for several years before the assassination attempt rendered my lower half completely inert. This kinda feels normal to me,� he said. �Oh, yeah, and I was all distracted because I have just jumped through unusual dimensions and all that, you know?�

Then we just stood around in the hallway for a sec.

�Nice place you got here, by the way,� he said. �It looks ridiculously huge. I bet it takes someone like you about eight hours to make it down the other end of the house, and that�s if you�re running.�

�Not really,� I said. I knew he was joking, but he said it seriously. And I was too tired to say, �Heh.�

�Hey, can I have a guided tour?� He asked, starting to walk down the hallway a bit, about to poke his head into the bedroom.

�Uh, maybe some other time,� I said, getting between him and the door. I was pretty good at getting in between people and things because I was small. That would have been my role in a team if I were a sportsperson.

�Oh, OK, I get it,� he said.

I didn�t know whether he really got it, or he got something else, or he was just saying that. He might have actually got it because somehow when he had been stuck in the fountain or in his interdmensional universe or whatever, he had somehow got wind of the fact that I�d saved the image of him unconscious lying in a pool of his own blood as my desktop image. But I didn�t know how to interpret this particular instance of �getting it� for sure.

Coming to think of that, I decided to sprint down the corridor and shut down my computer.

�Uh, just a sec � I gotta turn something off,� I said, disappearing in the dark through my house.

�Yeah, cool, whatever. I kinda need to lie down, though. I haven�t been able to sleep since I got kidnapped by your water feature.�

I could hear him opening a door. Fuck. Why couldn�t he just stand there? It�s embarrassing to have someone uncover the fact that you�ve just had sex with a statue, even if they kind of knew it already. In the past, I had kinda known lots of facts about people that I never properly confronted. It was better that way. Everybody has that.

I hastily shut down the computer and ran back up the corridor again like a maniac.

Yeah, he had opened that door. I actually gasped.

But the statue had gone. It must have gone out the window, silently, and back to the fountain. The curtain was flapping in the breeze. The breeze swirling into the bedroom was no longer magic.

�Thank Christ,� I muttered under my breath.

�What?� Asked Vaughn.

�I just muttered something under my breath,� I said, going over to the window and shutting it. I could see the statue back on the fountain. It was sitting on the edge of the bit that was supposed to hold lilypads and fish and stuff. It had its hands around its knees and its face turned away.

I shut the curtain.

�Yeah, I know what you muttered, but I don�t know why you muttered it,� he said, lying down on the rumpled bed and taking up all of it. �I think I�ve got superhuman hearing now.� He spread his arms out and buried his head in a part of the bedcovers that had only been the location of some PG shenanigans, thank god.

I could not be fucked making up an excuse as to why he shouldn�t sleep in this bed just to alleviate my uneasiness about its most recent history, so I didn�t.

�Hey, this bit of the bed�s really warm, and this other bit�s really cold,� he said, muffled through the bedclothes. �I�m going to sleep now. Goodnight.�

He put a pillow over his head, like that was a cue for me to go away.

OK. That was it?

I shut the door on Vaughn Bourbon and went to the kitchen. I found an unopened packet of Iced Vo-vos in the most unplumbed depths of the pantry, and put them on the bench as a suggestion for breakfast for Vaughn. I wondered which one of us would wake up first. It was hard to say.

I went into my messy cave opposite the kitchen and shut the folding doors. Benny Hinn was on. For once, I decided to turn the TV off. I finally had enough pleasant thoughts stored up from the last hour or so to beat Benny Hinn and tide me over into sleepy land.

I lay on my lilo and felt calm. I felt a twinge in my chest. It was a good kind of twinge. It was the kind of twinge I had had when I used to pull up in the train to Shepparton station on the weekends and I could see my mum waiting for me on the platform.

But I was trying not to think of that. I was also trying not to think of the fact that Vaughn looked completely different. I mean, he might have not gotten sleep for X amount of days, and had lost his fingers and all that, but he looked like he had been to a fucking skin specialist or something. He had that inner glow that people always had on the myriads of infomercials I had dozed through the entirety of since I had moved into the house. He wasn�t like the statue, all dreamy and Hellenic and lissom. He was just a weirdly better him.

His mood appeared to be the same old story, though.

I drifted off to sleep in a slow, difficult crawl. I dreamt about contrapposto poses and Mount Olympus and what it would be like to be shot by a flaming arrow, just general things like that. I also dreamt that I wished it would rain.

The sleep I had only felt like a few seconds. Some people say that all the hugely long dreams you have only really last an instant. Sleep is a place where time could be anything.

I woke up to a gagging sound. It was coming from all the way down the end of the corridor; the huge bedroom. My first thought was that the statue was murdering Vaughn in a jealous rage. If only I could have gotten some fucking sleep around here.

I ran to the bedroom and burst through the door. Nope, it was just Vaughn there, leaning on the side of the bed with a serious, body-wrenching cough.

�Shit man, are you OK?� I asked.

�Yeah, I�m cool,� he choked, through the coughs. �I think I must have snorted in my sleep or something. I think I have superhuman breathing now, too.�

�I guess that�s possible,� I said, with an upwards inflection.

I watched the rest of the coughing fit, not helping. I just stayed in the doorway with my arms folded, observing uncomfortably. I�d never read the part of the first aid book we got at the start of uni where it told you how to be useful in blocked airway types of situations. The choking and the hacking and the full-bodied coughing subsided after nearly two whole minutes.

He looked at me and he seemed ridiculously well-rested again. �Hey, what time is it?� He asked.

I looked at the art deco style clock on the wall. I�d never changed its batteries or even checked the time on it before, yet it still kept going, accurate to the second. I knew this because I confirmed the time by going to the kitchen and looking at the microwave.

�Shit, it is really nine-thirty PM. We must have slept through the entire day.�

Yeah, now that I mentioned it, I felt pretty good too. I still didn�t feel like venturing in front of a mirror though.

�Uh, hey. Do you want a shower?� I asked. �I�ve got two.�

�Nah, I think the fountain cleaned me,� said Vaughn. �Check this out. Feel the back of my hand.�

I felt it. It did seem clean. It felt squeaky clean. It seemed as fresh as a daisy.

�I�m getting a vibe off myself that I�m never going to have to have a shower again. Smell my armpit,� he said.

I smelt it. It kind of smelt like deodorant made out of all natural ingredients. It was actually quite pleasant.

I said, �Wow. That smells like deodorant.�

He said, �Yeah. And I never wear any.�

I said, �That�s weird.�

He said, �Yeah.�

�Does it feel like you�ve had colonic irrigation too?� I asked.

�I wouldn�t know,� said Vaughn. �I�ve never had my butt cleaned out by another person. But, now that you mention it, it does feel pretty tidy in there.�

�Damn,� I said. �Maybe I should jump into the fountain for a few days.�

�No way,� he said. �No way. You do not want to do that.�

�How come?�

�Oh, I�ll tell you later,� he said, mysteriously, yawning at the same time. �Anyway, I think I want to sleep just a little bit more now, OK? Like, maybe another day, or another hour. I�m not sure yet. I don�t feel quite real.�

�Alright,� I said.

He put the pillow over his head again and I went out.

I didn�t feel like sleeping anymore so I turned the computer back on again and changed the desktop background from the bloodied image of an unconscious Vaughn Bourbon to a picture of a Labrador puppy in a bowl of cherries.

Then I went on Wikipedia and looked up Interdimensional Travel. It wasn�t very helpful. In fact, it didn�t really have a page. I was trying to find out whether going between dimensions could give you a chesty cough, but it wouldn�t tell me.

I could have gone out to say a quiet hi to the statue, but I felt shy about what had happened the night before. It had seen me naked. I had seen it get a stiffy.

By the time the sun came up, I had surfed all my way through Twilight of the Gods and came out in Heat Death of the Universe.

The birds began to sing. That was when I heard the hacking cough again, echoing down the corridor, way, way worse than before.