the story becomes a funny and haunting commentary on everything from the stagnation of conformity to the flash fire spread of celebrity to the mutability of legacy. at first he is a curiosity that people line up to gawk at through windows, but the beard's continued growth becomes alarming - this can't happen "here."Īnxiety breeds anarchy and the ordered foundations of "here" become vulnerable. That stubborn hair that has plagued him all his life begins to multiply and grow unstoppably and equally resistant to grooming or cutting.ĭave's beard upsets the natural order of here as it begins to grow and grow and eventually take over the town. no one has ever actually been "there" and lived to tell the tale, but the mythology of "there" persists in urban legends - those who venture "there" undergo a painful reassembly where their bodies are turned inside outĭave's free time is spent in his chair sketching the view outside his window and listening to this song over and over to keep the questions and the fears and the "untidy dreams" at bay. "there" is what exists out past the boundaries of "here," out past the sea - a place of disorder, chaos and evil. and neither does anyone else working there.Īnd every lunchtime, once he's conveyed all of the latest information in his careful brightly coloured, many-fonted presentation, Dave was always left with a nagging question at the end: did any of what he'd just said mean anything at all? And following the question, the familiar, disturbing suspicion that the real reason for all the data and the meetings for A&C even being here was fear.Īnd fear of what, you ask? fear of "there." but he has no idea what the company actually does. he works at a&c industries, where his days are spent deeply immersed in charts and graphs and powerpoint presentations, organizing numbers and data into orderly rows. the streets make up a perfectly-aligned grid, the trees are obsessively maintained, everyone is well-groomed and polite, and every person every day follows the same routine like clockwork.ĭave is a completely hairless individual, except for his eyebrows and this one stubborn hair under his nose that grows back immediately no matter what he does to remove it. no, he lives in a place called "here," which is a tightly controlled walled-off urban island, where everything is impeccably, impossibly neat. not here, in my studio apartment with me - that would be crazy. The job of the skin is to keep it all in and never let anything show.ĭave lives here. OH MY GOD GIANT EVIL BEARD CUTOUT!!! BEST IDEA EVER!īeneath the skin of everything is something nobody can know.
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