Please find attached my report regarding my recent personality crisis. I will not be fit for work. Your sincerely, Dirk.

You wouldn’t think it to look at me, this shattered man in a dressing gown, but I was once a promising reporter.  I have not written anything since the event on the Twelfth of October 1998 – the fateful day half of my psyche was melded with that of an escaped zoo panda.

            I will try and start from the beginning.  My thoughts are scattered on this topic though I think of it daily.  Constantly.  It haunts my dreams as my waking hours.  I cannot explain this in my traditional reportage style.  It would seem absurd.  It is absurd.  But I must explain it.  The fact it did not happen practically speaking is obvious, though that makes it no less the truth.  Nothing ‘happens’ but by consensus, but if I tell you a panda robbed me of my left hemisphere and left a hunger for bamboo shoots and a sexual malaise in its wake, then surely I am the best qualified to comment?  What do you know of my soul, or anyone else’s but your own?

           

            This is connected.  Pay attention.  The letter you are reading was left as a note, in a sealed envelope, delivered by hand to my parents’ address, where I had been staying while in recuperation from an ongoing nervous disorder, which had reared its ugly head once more.  The fact that I had improved enough to return to my job as a sub-editor  at the Ross Gazette.  It was a satisfactory life, and the fact that it was lonely was not entirely a problem.  I felt self-sufficient.  I didn’t need anyone else.  Particularly as my best friend turned out to be imaginary. 

            The letter was never delivered to me.  By some chance, my parents had been away on holiday or it would have been burnt for sure.  A neighbor had been tending to the animals and watering the plants, and doing countless other everyday chores, in exchange for a recompense in alcohol.  I was contacted by our neighbour on the opposing side of the house when they heard generalized shouting emerging from the kitchen at the rear of the building.  They suggested I came back.

            I did.  It took me a short time to slipstream home to Chepstow.  The route was magnetically imprinted in me, muscle memory drove me.  Vague memories entered back in.  A noxious cocktail of emotions of every type drifted in through the window which I smoked out of, flicking sparking orange ends out behind onto the diminishing rearview street. 

I arrived to see a toaster thrown through the window and a flailing shadow of my neighbor Bob cursing about some “Evil fucking Panda invading his thoughts”.  At this point I had no idea about the letter.  I assumed Bob had simply gone mad.

There is nothing simple about madness.

I saw a rusted sawn-off shotgun on the step to my house.  I swear it was there but some entity beyond my comprehension removed it from the narrative of my day.  Yet it existed clear as a passing cat, and it’s transience was simply movement on another plane.  I maintain that shotgun exists still, one place or another, though I doubt I shall ever encounter it.  In it’s place was a vase of forget-me-nots which I did not recall previously being there but had such an aged look that they patently had been there some time.  I chose to forget this incident.

This is what I remember.  Rewind to the morning.  It had been a baffling dreamful night.  I was writing up a story about myself in the third person, trying desperately to pull together the facts of myself.  I had to report this to my supervisor at the Oklahoma gazette.  I was American in the dream and my name was Dirk Darlington.  I found it odd on waking that I remembered the specifics of my name in dream consciousness, where normally I would remain a nameless entity in substitution for my habitual ego-patterns I call myself.  Nevertheless, I was Dirk Darlington. 

I had a related dream four years ago, which I mentioned to my therapist, who said little while nodding cautiously in the lulls between paragraphs of blether.  The dream founded the basis of a story I had been working on in secret which had been the undoing of my career and personal life.  It was a detective novel, with Dirk Darlington as the protagonist, who found himself in a Motel 6 one day after a peculiarly exuberant drinking spree.

I revised the start of the story one hundred times approximately.  It ended up much as it started out.

Dirk Darlington writhed uselessly in the bed.  He could see nothing.  Why he could see nothing was not yet apparent.  He felt the bed to be unfamiliar, and had a sense he was being watched.  He removed his sleeping mask.  Across the room was a toned and exotic stranger, also masked, but she could see him through tiny peepholes cut roughly around the eyes.  She smiled wryly as he tried to piece together what had happened.  He felt his memory had been wiped. 

The sheets had been folded apple pie style and he couldn’t quite remove himself from their grip.  Nevermind, he thought.  It appeared he was in no iminant danger.  Images came back to him of a tainted ocean, swirling with ink and cactus pods which shuffled uselessly in a spiky film on the surface.  This was the dream he had.  He wracked and dredged his memory for the previous day.

He recalled an incoming phonecall.  He recalled sipping from a glass.  After then was blackness.

Little does anyone know that underneath Chepstow Castle is a crypt that contains a portal.  Nobody who has stepped into this portal has returned.  But information has been fed back through digital probe devices which were sent at the start of the eighties.  It was not until 2002 that the information arrived back, somewhat garbled, via a satellite transmitter on the plains of Antartica.  The transmission was relaid to me via an ex zookeeper and surreptitious mescaline imbiber who told me in confidence about the panda situation.  How he learned about it I wasn’t entirely sure, but he had subsequently tracked down the panda, and myself, and given me photographs of MRI scans which revealed the panda to have a human response to visual stimuli on one side of the brain.  This is how I came to hear about the simple fate of a half-ruined newspaperman in Chepstow, England who came to believe he was half panda.  He was also, as chance would have it, the cousin of my oldest friend, Elise.  This remains for another tale, however.

I woke up with the feeling I was still in a dream.  Someone had been interfering with my radio, as it was tuned to a different station.  I was in my own bed, but there was a peculiarly curvy bottle of Ambre Solaire upon the bedside table.  They must have rebranded the thing, for it resembled a shapelier Coca Cola bottle but with ribs.  I found it strange, so inspected it.  The bottle was slightly lighter than I expected, minutely, and there was a residue around the rim.  It had perhaps been used just once.  I smelt the lid and the image of a woman came to me, someone from a hotel room I had once woken up in one Oklahoma morning.  This was a vague sensation akin to memory but less reliable.  It had the substantiality of smoke, but the weight of a star.  It was then that I saw the number on the side of the bottle, written in numerals with European 7s stroked across the middle with a gentle slash.  I rose.

I was still in my pyjamas and dressing gown.  I normally slept naked, which gave me the odd feeling of having been put to bed.  I looked out of the window and saw a hundred motorbikes crossing the bridge over the River Wye.  I guessed it was October.  I remembered a bludgeoning given to me by my feral neighbor, as he ranted about pandas and blackened my eyes with a broom handle.  I could not piece anything together.  It was as though I was living two parallel lives and was shifting between the two.  Then I remembered the wormhole, under the castle, and knew that it had to be stopped.  If that panda had gone in there and arrived half man, what lay within?  What would I become if I met the same fate?  Was I that same Panda?  I looked in the mirror, with black patches round my eyes.  My hair needed cutting and I felt a lingering sense of shame as one might after disappointing a lover or losing a sack race.

I shouldn’t be reduced to this.  I am a reporter.  A seeker of the truth.  I looked at my ruined face.  I searched inside for a name, and all I had was Dirk Darlington and visions of the jungle.  I had to return, and I knew the portal would take me there, to the epicenter, to where I as a young adventurer had gone to partake in the peyote ritual that had split me into three, two of which were human, and one of which was simply an animal vessel for my own fragmented Anima, lost to the wind, never to be returned, and the zombie husk left in the jungle was my original frame, the one that had been loved by the glamourous woman in the photo with the topaz encrusted frame that I found in my drawer at my parents, who never returned from holiday for one reason or another, which never became clear.

Apologetically, I submit this article, two weeks over deadline, to my employer, the Ross Gazette, which they may chose to re-edit for sense as desired, or to discard, and I hope they will accept my gratitude in the time I spent in their employ, before I ran off to travel the world and arrived in the jungle, before I was mind melded with a subterranean timeshifting panda who acted as intermediary between myself and an American gentleman who I appeared to dream on behalf of, who never dialed the number to find out that it was in fact my number, left by the woman who had meant to help me by contacting the man whose consciousness I shared so intimately. 

This may be considered to be my resignation.  Clearly I am not fit for work in the capacity of regional reporter.  I am off to Hollywood to write for television, if I can make it through customs with my paws intact.  Thank you for all the bamboo.