I meant to say, as a point of insignificance, that on the 10.08.01, I was crossing the Swiss border. You see? Exactly a month before the attack on the WTC! At the time of the attack, I was walking next to the Bertoldsbrunnen in Freiburg, and turned around to watch the TV in a showroom window. Time to go to the mountains.At that point, a deranged gunman went mad with a gun in Zug Canton. Switzerland was no longer safe, either. Nowhere was safe. There was nowhere to run to anymore!

Except, I realised, if I were to disguise myself as an elephant and go to Switzerland to re-enact many of the comedy half-hours my parents and grandparents had drooled over all those years ago. I could wander around the Alp ("Alp" is just the word for the upper meadow, not the mountain) in peace. In the Ancient World, many armies used these dummy elephants—usually a camel disguised as an elephant—to scare off enemy elephants with their smell. I would first of all have to disguise myself as a camel, and then as an elephant. Perfecto!
          Taking my faithful St. Bernard, Heidi, I donned the disguise I had constructed out of various towels and very cleverly placed fake toupees and Groucho Marx fake moustaches and spectacles. I walked (or trundled) from one side of the Alp to the other, occasionally trumpeting and gnawing tree stumps. This was the Great Escape every school boy dreams of:  my own Alp, my own St. Bernard, my very own amazing disguise! Heidi would bring the newspapers everyday, and a small flask of brandy, some muesli and cheese/bread combo and a bagel with cream cheese. Afterwards, she would invariably walk over to the side of the Alp, follow the little path downhill, and arrive back some hours later, after happily fornicating with the village goats.
          I realised totally that my escape into the Alps was the final elaboration of my desire to climb back into the womb and find that primal, maternal space. Gazing at the stars at night, my elephant psyche reasoned that the universe was a tent-like canopy, that the universe was supported by a chimpanzee standing on top of a humanoid. Shit, elephant creation myths weren't much different from human creation myths. For, what, after all, was 'I'…?
          In the long Darwinian journey from human to towel to toupee to elephant, I passed the Pole Star, the Dog Star, Orion,… but never the Elephant Star, Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier, Beethoven's symphonies; at the end of the universe I gazed upon a pair of Marilyn Monroe fake boobs.
          By dawn, I was a newly created something. The original dawn of creation shone on my brow—not that my brow was shining, hidden as it was beneath a clown suit and a Karl Marx fake beard. I was the most unhunted person on the planet. Absolutely no one wanted to know me. I had no mobile phone, either. All connections with the human race had disappeared; I was adrift on an ice floe into vast cosmic oceans, where none of the penguins had a mobile or a dial-up connection to throw me.
          Kein Anschluß unter dieser Nummer. …


(A frequent contributor to the magazine, Paul Murphy lives in Belfast, where he edits Engine. ["The number you have dialed is no longer in service."])