Once upon a time, everyone lived on a pier. It had been built to extend the island where the people had lived ever since their ancestors had crawled from the ocean, many years before. The pier was built so that the inhabitants of the island might peer down into the ocean (which they loved to look at) or fish in its waters. But then, because so many fish were caught from the pier, it was extended further and further out into the sea, until the land was so far away, and the nets bulged with so many fish, that the people of the pier decided to live on it forever. They built their houses on the pier, and gardens, and machines to catch fish, and made their lives very easy and very comfortable.
In fact, their lives got so easy and comfortable that, eventually, everyone stopped believing in the ocean. This extraordinary development came about because the pier did not just extend outwards, into the world, but also inwards, into the selves of the people who lived on it, who were now so dependent on what the pier could do for them, that it became worrying, and then frightening, and then actively threatening to believe that there was anything in life other than the pier.
Loudspeakers around the pier, along with its storytellers and singers, told the people that there was no ocean, that it was all pier. If someone suggested that there might be an ocean somewhere, they were laughed at. ‘This is the ocean,’ they were told, ‘we are swimming in it!’ For there was a wall around the edge of the pier, upon which the sea was realistically painted, and through the speakers came the constant swishing sound of the waves. There were also little bottles of the ocean you could buy and paddling pools you could slap around in. So in the end, nobody thought they were living on a pier at all. ‘This is the ocean. We are swimming in it!’
Of course it was always possible to uncover this amazing lie by diving into the ocean yourself. The entrance was hard to spot, but it wasn’t far away. All you had to do was lift the plank you were standing on (none of them were nailed down very well) and fall thirty feet into the sea. The people felt a constant pull toward the ocean, and they grew sick from denying this urge, but to try to leave the pier was considered an act of criminal madness, and anyone caught lifting one of the boards was sent straight to the funny farm. If you even talked of leaving the pier, you were at risk; you certainly couldn’t get a nice job on the pier, or be taken seriously by your fellows.
Finally, all the materials the people had used to build the pier began to break down. The island from which the pier’s wood, iron, soil and seeds had come, was now a wasteland. It was finished. It had been incorporated into the pier long ago anyway. The future, which the pier-people had been so confident about, a confidence that had seeped into their very blood, and made them smug and self-satisfied, that future was no longer what it used to be.
At first, the people tried to pretend that nothing was wrong; everything decayed quite slowly at first, so, unless you were paying very close attention, it was hard to notice any change at all. But by the time the pier’s nets started breaking and its roofs started falling in and soil from its gardens started blowing away, it was far too late. The people were starving, and they were terrified. The leaders of the pier tried to take control of the situation, by hoarding dwindling fish stocks and violently repressing dissent, but it was no good. Civil wars broke out, and revolutions, and then everyone broke the pier apart themselves, with their own hands, mostly because they were insane now, but also because the pier that the people once loved, that they would have given their lives for, they now hated, and they would rather die than live on it.
Finally, the wreck that the pier had become fell into the ocean, and the waves swallowed the people.