GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2019/20

LEW FURBER
‘Winford’s Dot’

WINFORD DE WIT, SR. was one hundred and one years old and had had every success a man could have: love given, love received, and not too much to think about.

He knew few things. The things he knew were that he loved his son, Winford de Wit, Jr., and that he would like to see him again before the end. He knew many other things, being a practical man in his eleventh decade, but he approached that knowledge gently, never from behind, cooing softly as he went, so as not to scare it away nor cause it to turn on him. He knew how to fix a car and how to build one from scratch, and he knew how to make good pizza from bad ingredients. He did not think, being a sensitive man in his eleventh decade, that this knowledge was particularly important.

Winford de Wit, Sr. was lonely. He was the oldest person he had ever known. He had seen in his little world the entire set of people, who were alive at the moment of his birth, live and die and be replaced by others. Many of those had also lived and then died, and many of them he missed dearly. Three of those dearly missed people were dogs.

Winford de Wit, Jr. was born when Senior was fifty-five years old. It was late for his first child and it was late for his wife, too: she was thirty-seven and she was called Sylvia. She died when she was sixty-three.

Senior was eighty-one and, by then, he was already the oldest person he had ever known, and all he had left to him was a twenty-six year old Junior and a one year old German Pointer dog called Winford IV; the Third was another German Pointer dog, who had died that year. The Second was Junior and the First was Senior.

When Winford de Wit, Sr. was eighty-two, Junior moved far away from his father and his dog. Looking back through the wide end of the telescope of his life, Senior could make out only the vague and small shapes of a disagreement about greed. Junior wanted money and Senior wanted the people he had lost.

It was not an estrangement, they said. They called each other on the telephone regularly, then less regularly, then only Senior called, then Junior stopped picking up. He was busy and had his own life, Senior told Winford IV, who did not understand.

He began to write letters to his son, to keep him up to date and to tell him he loved him. Most of these letters remained unanswered. Junior had not yet gained enough experience to become truly heartless, but he was selfish and self-absorbed, and he replied only when it suited him.

Senior wrote to his son to tell him Winford IV had died at eight years old after developing tumours. He told his son he loved him and wanted to see him again.

Junior did not reply.

Senior wrote his son a letter two months later to tell him he had brought home a new German Pointer puppy, a girl this time. He told his son he had called the dog Winifred the First and Last because he was now eighty-eight years old, but he was excited to have a companion again. He told his son he loved him and wanted to see him again.

Junior replied to say that he would visit his father and meet his new dog as soon as he could, but he did not visit that year.

Senior sent more letters and invited his son to special occasions. He invited him to Christmas and then he invited him to mark his mother’s birthday in February and then to mark his mother’s death in March. He invited him to Easter and he invited him for a Summer holiday. He invited him to celebrate their shared birthday, the 24th December, when Senior would be ninety-nine and Junior would be forty-four. He told his son he loved him and wanted to see him again.

This last request received a response. Junior wrote to his father to tell him he would be there at 10 p.m. the day before Christmas Eve, owing to the combination of trains and flight he had to take to get there.

Winford de Wit, Sr. danced a jig around Winifred the First and Last and set out with the dog into the cool September air. Winifred loved to find blackberries and pluck them carefully from the bushes in the park where she had walked and played every day and become the old man’s last friend. Senior filled his pockets with berries and froze them when he got home. He would make a birthday pie in December to celebrate the reunion with his son, using the fruits found on the happiest day of his year so far.

The pie lay cooling on the kitchen table at 9 p.m. on 23rd December while Senior put on his best clothes. He had made his good pizza dough from bad ingredients and he had set out the components of his son’s favourite toppings. He admitted, however, that after all these years, they might not be his favourites any more. But he hoped.

By midnight, his son had not arrived.

By New Year’s Eve, his son had not arrived, but a letter had.

Junior apologised to his father. He had been so busy with his work he had forgotten to buy his train and plane tickets before they became too expensive, and he hoped to see his father soon.

In April, Winifred the First and Last died, aged eleven, and Winford de Wit, Sr. was entirely alone.

Senior continued his lopsided correspondence with Junior. He felt still rather spritely but too old for another dog, he told his son. He had taken, he said, to tinkering with and building machines like he did all those years ago after a short lifetime in mechanical engineering. He thought it prudent to build himself some helpful machines before he reached his overdue frailty. He told his son he loved him and wanted to see him again.

First, he made a platform on four telescopic legs. The platform could be moved up and down between floor and table height via a remote control. He used it for his shoes: he placed a pair on the platform, which was in front of a chair, lowered the platform to the floor, and sat on the chair. He slipped his feet into the shoes, raised the platform to its middle height, and was able to tie his laces without leaning forward.

He was very pleased with this contraption, though he did not yet need it. He called it the Knees-Up Machine. He wrote to Junior to tell him about it. He told his son he loved him and wanted to see him again.

Second, he made a portable machine which could gently pick up small and fragile items which had fallen to the floor. He thought this would be useful for picking up screws and filaments and rubber bands and wires and washers when he was too stiff to bend down. He called this machine the Rubber Band Hand. He wrote to Junior to tell him about it. He told his son he loved him and wanted to see him again.

He was pleased with the Rubber Band Hand and the Knees-Up Machine and all the other contraptions he had invented to ease his decrepitude, but still he longed to see his son, the only still-living being to whom he had any special connection and the only person now, at his advanced age, who could pierce his loneliness.

An idea came to him one afternoon as he tinkered with his old telephone, which had not been used for some years. He thought about the way the voice was transported almost instantly to the ear of a person far away and he thought about how he wanted his son to visit him. He followed these thoughts and found himself at his dining room table sketching designs for a new machine. If a voice could travel instantly anywhere in the world – so long as there was a device to receive it – then, he reasoned, the same could be done with the rest of the body.

It took a year of mathematics and one more of tinkering before, at the age of one hundred and one, Winford de Wit, Sr. became the inventor of the world’s first teleportation machine.

It resembled two separate metal cabinets, each large enough to enclose a human being sitting on a chair. On the cabinets’ tops and sides were wires and aerials and lights and buttons and valves and switches and dials. He named his machine Houdini’s Highway.

He tested the machine by placing a red apple on the chair inside one of the metal cabinets. He shut the door, fiddled with the buttons and switches and dials, and the apple left the cabinet and arrived in the other in less than a second.

Senior was pleased by this, so he tested it again, first with a daffodil in a pot – the first living thing ever to be teleported – then with a box of crickets he bought from the pet shop and saved from the jaws of a pet lizard, and finally with a mouse, which he bought from the pet shop and saved from the jaws of a pet snake. Then he swapped the cabinets around and tested it again.

He wrote to his son and told him he had the most wonderful gift for him, but it was too large and too expensive and too fragile to send through the post. Junior would have to come to collect it and, when he did, they would never miss each other again. He told his son he loved him and wanted to see him again.

Senior wrapped one of the metal cabinets in a big red ribbon and waited for his son to reply or arrive.

No reply came after a week, so Senior sent his son another letter. He told his son he loved him and wanted to see him again.

Two weeks later, a reply dropped through the letterbox onto the small conveyer belt which brought all post to the kitchen table. Junior thanked his father for the gift, but regretted that he did not know when he would be able to collect it.

Two months passed. Senior sent another letter, reminding his son to collect his gift.

He told his son he loved him and wanted to see him again.

It took him a long time to write the letter. That morning he had used the Knees-Up Machine to put on his shoes.

A letter came, which reassured the old man that his son would visit him and collect his gift as soon as work allowed.

Three more months passed. Senior sent another letter. His handwriting was much larger now and it had the tremulous gait of a slow old hand. He wanted his son to have half the machine so that, no matter how busy Junior was, father and son could visit each other in an instant, if only for an instant, one more time before the end. He was hopeful it would be more. He told his son he loved him and wanted to see him again.

Winford de Wit, Sr. died the day before Christmas Eve at the age of one hundred and one years.

Winford de Wit, Jr. received a letter from a lawyer, who informed him his father had died and he was the sole executor of his estate. He got on the first plane back to his hometown, to his father and mother’s house, to tally up his inheritance.

The house contained some antique furniture with a little value and, if all the strange contraptions were removed and the décor modernised, he could sell the house for a small fortune. Seventy years ago, the house was in a slum. The city was much bigger now and the slum had become desirable and expensive.

The house was littered with framed photographs of Junior and his mother and three German Pointer dogs. There was a mouse in a cage in the kitchen. There were crickets in a tank. Junior did not take these.

He walked around the house with a notebook, writing down all the things he wanted to sell and where in the house they could be found. In the garage, he found some blue and white china vases, which his mother must have bought. They were in a box on a spindly antique table, which stood in front of two large cabinets covered by white sheets.

He removed one of the sheets and found himself looking at a metal cabinet, adorned with gadgetry and wrapped in a wide red ribbon. On the door, his father had taped an envelope.

The letter in the envelope told him what the machine was and what had been its intended use. Junior was sceptical, but he followed the instructions in his father’s letter and proved to himself the machine’s function.

Junior’s greed rumbled inside him. He could not believe what the needy old fool had created, but even less could he believe that he had not intended to make money from it.

It was true that Junior had been busy, too busy to see his father even once in the last nineteen years of his life. For the first ten of those years, he had worked hard in the banking industry and made enough money to always carry a wallet so stuffed with banknotes that its shape resembled a small blimp. He retired early and invested his money in stocks and misbehaviour. He was grand and proud and rich, and felt deserving of praise for being so. He spent lavishly when it benefitted him, and was an obnoxious miser when it did not.

His avarice was starved out unexpectedly. The markets turned and Winford de Wit, Jr. lost almost every penny he had. That was two weeks before his father’s death. He was by no means poor then, but he would not make money by spending some of the relatively little he had left on visiting a sentimental old man.

That changed when he found Houdini’s Highway under white sheets in the garage. He felt he should feel some remorse for not seeing his father, but this feeble glance at nobility was overpowered by his sense that fortune was providing for him. He did not see the tragedy. He saw only that he was lucky and that he deserved that luck.

The house was emptied and sold. Debts were paid and Junior considered how he would make money from his father’s machine. This is what he did: he took one half of the machine to London and the other half to New York City. He charged people ten times the cost of a plane ticket to cross the Atlantic in less than a second. A business grew and the machine was duplicated. Soon over a million people per day were teleporting across oceans and continents and, sooner still, Winford de Wit, Jr. was a billionaire.

He retired once more and took the original machine, which his father had made for him, as a souvenir. Junior had become an old man himself and needed a way to get upstairs in his ostentatious mansion.

One morning, he called two of his strongest servants to move the machine to a different location – one half beside his bed and the other beside the toilet. When they had moved the two halves of the machine, the servants came to Junior in his bed and handed him a yellowed envelope. They said they had found it inside a compartment inside the machine. The envelope had Winford de Wit, Jr.’s name on it.

Junior took the letter, knowing that it could only be from his father. The letter was brief and in two parts: his father instructed him never to put one half of the machine inside the other and turn it on. That was the first part. The second part was different. His father told him about loneliness. His father told him that a hundred acquaintances could not cure it. His father told him of the pain of it and his hope that it would end. His father told him he loved him and wished that he had been able to see him one last time.

The letter angered Junior. His father’s brazen attempt to stir his dormant heart angered him. The fact that his father was right, and that he, having everything, was lonely, angered him.

But what angered him most of all was his father’s stupidity. The old man had invented the greatest machine in human history and thought of no use for it other than to inflict his presence on his son.

Junior had ignored the old man’s wishes for the machine’s use and made himself the richest man in the world by doing so. What possible bounty awaited him if he ignored his father again?

He ordered the servants to fetch the half of the machine which was in the bathroom and to bring it to its twin at his bedside. Except, now that he looked at it closely, they were not twins. One of the cabinets was subtly misshapen and slightly smaller than the other. The door of the larger cabinet was wider.

The servants, to their surprise, fitted the smaller cabinet into the larger one and then they closed the door. They stepped aside as Junior approached the machine and twisted dials and pushed buttons and flicked switches. One last switch activated it.

Around the machine, reality began to lens and warp, and after less than a second everything was being pulled into the machine, into a single point. The machine itself was drawn in first. Junior and his servants were drawn in and, soon, so were his bedroom furniture, his bedroom, the ostentatious mansion, the entire continent, and then the whole world and its moon. The machine kept drinking everything in, compressing it down into one place, one tiny point containing every atom of every thing there ever was, every atom of every feeling or word there ever was, and every atom of every animal and human being who had ever lived. The machine sucked and siphoned and drew and drank until the entire universe was contained within the singularity, the one point of infinity suspended in nothingness: nothing more than everything, contained in a Dot.

Inside the Dot there was Winford de Wit, Sr. and Winford de Wit, Jr.. They were the Dot. Inside the Dot there was Sylvia de Wit and there was Winford III, Winford IV, and Winifred the First and Last. They were the Dot. Inside the dot there was everyone and everything there had ever been or ever would be. They were the Dot.

And there was hate inside the Dot, and malice. And there was love inside the Dot, and kindness. Love, as so often had happened when they were apart, became hate and hate became love, and inside the Dot they were one. Malice, as so often had happened when they were apart, became kindness and kindness became malice and inside the Dot they were one.

They all bickered terribly inside the Dot, so much that their bickering threatened to break it apart again. But, they agreed, they were together, and they hummed a brittle little hum and hoped a brittle little hope. An old man’s atoms hummed and hoped along, for, inside the Dot, at last, no one was lonely.