The Plattner Story
In The Plattner Story by H. G. Wells, Gottfried Plattner is an under-qualified country school teacher who one day bungles a chemistry experiment and produces a violent explosion that completely obliterates him. No trace of him is found—not a single drop of blood, shred of clothing or shard of bone—until, four days later, he appears to fall out of thin air into the old walled garden behind the school.
Plattner claims to have been trapped for those four days in another dimension. His description of the world he encountered (of its inhabitants like luminous tadpoles with human faces, of its green sun and basaltic altars) tests the credulity of his listeners. But the crux of his claim appears to be corroborated by two unusual circumstances. The first: A large number of people in the neighborhood dreamt vivid dreams of Plattner prior to his return, dreams which all had a curious uniformity. In most of them, Plattner was seen wandering through a "coruscating iridescence." In all of them, his face was pale and distressed and he was gesticulating towards the dreamer. The second: Plattner returns from wherever he has been with all asymmetrical parts of his body inexplicably reversed. His heart, for example, is now on the right side. The lobes of his liver and his lungs are similarly contraposed. Since the occurrence, he has also become left handed. "If you were to cut a figure out of paper," the narrator explains, "you could easily reverse it by lifting it up and turning it over. But with a solid, it is different. There is no way of taking a man and moving him about in space (as we understand space) that will result in the transposition of left and right." However, according to mathematical theorists, a solid body could be reversed in the fourth dimension. And that is the narrator's conclusion: that Plattner has been to the Fourth Dimension and returned to our world. For me the resolution of this story was prefigured in a frightening dream that I had when I was around twenty-three. It featured a woman who was the mirror image of my mother (quite literally: the mole on the right hand of one was duplicated on the left of the other, and so on) and who planned to come into the house in order to kill my real mother. One day, I hear screams, identical screams, coming from the kitchen. I run to my mother's aid. The three of us grapple. There is a blundering struggle, shouting, hair-pulling. My free arm fumbles for and finds a knife on the kitchen bench. I am surprised at how easily it slides into the intruder's side, as though into wet clay. My mother and I drag the bloody body of her double into the garden and bury it. It is night. In awe of what has just happened, we work in silence: I dig, she rolls the body into the pit, we both cover it and pack down the earth... It is only once we have completed our grim task that I notice my "mother" is wearing her watch on her right hand... The penny drops. I gasp and back away. The doppelgänger grins horribly. |