Norbert Thistlegrub and the Chamber of Forgotten Knowledge

It all began with a curious pattern of parallel events all over the world.

People everywhere were shrinking and fraying in panic like socks in a dryer set to high spin, orbiting some invisible “thing” no one could quite name but everyone agreed was probably very bad and almost certainly out to get them. A sort of invisible itch tickled the underside of reality, and those who weren’t entirely swallowed by it were left pacing in circles, muttering about urgent and unseen threats and the general feeling that something was poking holes in our collective memory.

Enter Norbert Thistlegrub. Cartographer, philosopher, and amateur locksmith of unsolvable puzzles. He once mapped a sneeze and discovered skin mites carrying riddles which he coined “Subdermal Phynxlets.”

While the rest of the world squinted suspiciously at each other, Norbert tilted his head skyward and said quite sincerely,

“I think something down there is up to something.”

Soon stoics, cynics, empiricists, and people with fingers to smooth out their long beards began obsessing over the patterns of these peculiar events. They spoke of “The Lost World of the Subterranean Mind,” which sounded quite dramatic and possibly trademarked. Everyone agreed someone should go find it and come back grounded in something solid like reason or at least freshly baked bread—ideally french or sourdough.

No one had managed to do that yet. Most returned either babbling, vanishing, or opening Etsy shops that sold sweaters made of cat fur. But Norbert was fearless. He packed just a backpack containing only the essentials:

• Bottled deja vu

• A parchment of probable places

• Stamps labeled “Here Be Feelings”

• Ink made of distilled twilight

• A rogue pencil that wouldn’t draw in straight lines but always found truth

• And of course, his weathered copy of “Field Guide to the Topography of Thought”

And so, with no map but the one he’d yet to draw, Norbert Thistlegrub stepped into the labyrinth of his own mind, humming “Yellow Submarine” in search of whatever it was that had gone missing in the world—hoping, perhaps, to bring it back into its natural orbit or at least with properly labeled boundaries.

With the faint glow of elapsed time, distant sounds and flashing lights, Norbert sunk deeper and deeper into the swells of his own mind. It was the kind of place where one says the word “Tuesday” over and over until it stops sounding like a weekday and starts sounding like a soggy fruit. The first smudged chapter of his field guide called this particular sensation, “Chronopluminescense,” or the tendency of language to become more majestic the longer one sat there doing absolutely nothing.

He drove deeper, through the Department of Meaning trapped in bone since the Pleistocene. There, the corridors were lined with fossils of half-finished thoughts and the faint scent of old intentions, never quite washed away. The air hummed softly with echoes of internal debates that never resolve. Fragmented mutterings had calcified into artifacts—some labeled, most not, each one a curious relic from the Museum of Things You Meant to Say But Didn’t.

Then, suddenly, his sense of reality became dislocated. It was hailing drizzlewumps of the very worst kind—the ones that don’t soak your clothes but dampen your will to finish sentences. These particular drizzlewumps bypass the body entirely and go straight for the soul, leaving it mildly frizzy and unsure of its direction. Norbert pulled his collar up instinctively, though it offered no real protection against metaphysical precipitation. He consulted his rogue pencil, which sketched a picture of a confused duck.

That meant things were about to get serious.

Norbert found himself in a botanical field with flora of a most peculiar breed. There were doubting dandelions, which puffed clouds of “Are you sure about that?” with every step. Vexing vines curled around his ankles whispering things like, “No one likes you”, and “You won’t amount to anything” in tones eerily similar to his fifth grade teacher.

A cluster of strange orchids blushed when he looked at them too directly, muttering apologies and withering politely. But it was the shrub of certainty that struck Norbert most deeply. It stood regal and poised, with leaves spelling out definitive answers like “Always” and “Never” before promptly crumbling to ash.

Out came his field guide, which helpfully flipped itself open to a page titled “Chapter 7: A Catalog of Uncooperative Plants.” In the margins, he’d once scribbled:

“When in doubt, doubt better.”

So he did. He doubted more creatively like the sky's commitment to blue on Thursdays but not Fridays, the need for punctuation!@ and doubting his own dogged doubtfulness. And just like that, a path surrendered itself more inward like the foggy mist of a haunted estate.

Norbert, ever the thoughtful wanderer in worlds both real and imagined, rummaged through his backpack, pulled out an encouraging stamp and pressed it into the air behind him. One never knows when one might wish to retrace one's steps, especially when the steps might unstep themselves.

Dr. Seuss’ Midnight Paintings

Norbert stumbled into what appeared to be a vast underground laboratory—not filled with plants, but with bubbling theories in glowing orbs, emotional pumpkins hooked up to tubes and weeping syrup, and a pile of discarded memories wearing dirty aprons, mismatched gloves, and a single melted shoe. The air smelled faintly of burnt metaphor and last week’s curiosity. Somewhere in the distance, a chalkboard was arguing with itself in scribbles marked “Unverified but Deeply Held.”

Before he could get his bearings, a glimmering figure made entirely of translucent logic grabs him by the collar and gently informs him, in a language he’s fairly sure he spoke once in a dream:

“You are expected on the Observation Deck of the Subconscious Current. It’s already departing. Do hurry.”

Suddenly, a translucent doorway opened in the floor and Norbert fell through, arms flailing, into a spiraling tunnel of second guesses. Fleeting thought clouds raced passed him like “Probably fine,” “This might be important,” and “Turn back now if you’re afraid of the unknown.” Time bent. Gravity split in multiple directions. And then—THUD.

It wasn’t a noble kind of thud like a knight dismounting, but the clumsy, fallen-on-your-back-and-shoe-missing kind. The room smelled reminiscent of childhood disappointments and moments later his second shoe, apparently having taken the scenic route, landed squarely on his head. Somewhere, a piano played a minor chord and then muttered an apology. Norbert stood up slowly and muttered, “Right. Definitely still inside my own mind.”

Then an announcement rang out:

“Welcome to The Chamber of Forgotten Knowledge. Please mind the zimbleflaps.”

In this forgotten annex, abandoned insights, discarded facts, and misremembered truths went to sulk in the dust. Hovering nearby, a weary librarian made entirely of footnotes gestured politely toward a sign that read:

“Please no certainty shrubs.”

Norbert bowed solemnly, then accidentally sneezed into a scroll of forgotten proverbs which promptly rearranged itself to say, “Wisdom is knowing when to misplace something on purpose.”

The librarian asked what he had lost.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose I’m here to remember what the world forgot to remember.”

She wobbled in agreement or possibly indigestion and Norbert took that as permission to proceed. He moved slowly as shelves towered high of theories never tested and maps folded in on themselves like secrets. Something was humming faintly, a tune he couldn’t place but somehow knew the words to. That’s when he saw it—a chest labeled “Miscellaneous, Unverified, Potentially Embarrassing” in faded ink.

Naturally, he opened it. And there it was—a memory.

He saw a much younger version of himself, maybe six or seven, sitting in a classroom explaining something with boundless confidence—something utterly wrong. A long-winded tale about how clouds were made from the breath of sleeping giants and why rain happened when they snored too hard. His teacher had gently corrected him but the class had laughed. Not with him—at him.

Norbert watched the boy shrink just a little. “Ah, so this is where I left that.”

He tucked the memory carefully into a side pocket labeled “Reinterpretation” and gave it a comforting squeeze. It didn’t sting anymore. It was still a little raw, sure, but now it seemed oddly endearing, and in that that moment, a mop sweeping up shredded hypotheses drifted by and offered him a high five, which he gladly accepted.

A nearby spiral staircase unfurled itself like it had been waiting for him to remember that part of himself. As Norbert descended, the walls began to whisper in morse code and the words in his field guide had vanished on every page. Even the bottle of deja vu had become heavy like anvils.

Before Norbert could say “psychogeographic squiggle,” he found himself swept into a room that had most certainly not RSVP’d to this voyage. Finding the subterranean mind meant being the expedition, the guide, and the misplaced luggage all in one—and he was afraid. The kind one feels not of monsters or bad test scores, but of becoming something unintended.

The room had no doors and pulsed like a living, breathing machine. On one wall, a painting of a tunnel stared back at him, and for a brief moment, Norbert felt the painting was considering whether he was ready for it.

Norbert tried to sound brave for the sake of the walls.

“I suppose this is the part where forgetting remembers you.”

There in the center of the room, he tried to move. Nothing. Not in the usual way of stiff limbs or tangled cords, but as if his very intention had fallen into a pocket of space where cause and effect morphed into one jumbled pile of confusion. Time didn’t tick here. Location was not a point on a map.

Norbert had, quite unmistakably, wandered into a black hole of the mind, a chamber of un-ness. His arms floated when he didn’t lift them. His eyes refused to tell him what they were seeing. The air around him didn’t feel like air, but like thoughts had given up.

There was no up or down, no now or later. Logic had curled into a sack of existential potatoes. Even his doubts had gone quiet, which was how he knew things were serious. And then the pencil jumped out of his backpack to write on a bit of damp parchment:

“Forget your way out to remember why you came.”

So he did the only sensible thing one can do when floating inside a metaphysical void.
He stopped trying to leave. He ripped up the maps, closed his eyes, and for the first time in possibly ever, he allowed himself to be completely unlocated.

It was terrifying.

At first, the only senses he felt were the pressure in his chest, the fog in his head, and the heaviest of silences where nothingness meets extinction. Then came the sensation of being gently turned, as though the nothingness itself was reorienting him, like an unseen librarian shelving an unmemory back to where it belonged.

In the vast hush of this place of absolutely nothingness, Norbert discovered he’d developed a new sense—something neither sight nor sound, but a delicate vibration he felt along the fine hairs behind his elbow. Slender nerves attuned to distant poetry whispering across time. He coined it, “Aural Tincture Filaments.”

He remained still, not out of discipline, but because the place required it. Something ancient was attempting to tune him like an instrument. And just as a sneezing star once burst into being, Norbert, in this moment, became a receptor for all the poems that had never been written because no one had dared to forget loudly enough.

Beyond that, he could hear wiggle-thumping of barely audible dances of extinct creatures highly attuned to the humbugaters for measuring sincerity. Flickering twilight-born particles of forgotten knowledge began generating ancestral tales.

This was the true sound of something lost finally recognizing it had been found.

His vestigial whimsy glands began producing so much delight, instinctive spasms of forgotten species appeared out of nowhere and paraded through the room, carrying him off through the painted tunnel, up through the Chamber of Forgotten Knowledge, past the laboratory, through the garden of uncooperative plants, and back into the Museum of Things He Meant To Say But Didn’t. Suddenly, he had lots of things to say, and he couldn’t wait to say them.

Norbert unscrewed the jar of deja vu, as words were becoming more and more majestic over time, he took a great inhale of the released cloud, and he reappeared back into the room of his study.

It looked the same and entirely different. His desk, still cluttered with mostly-inkless pens and thought-stained scraps of parchment. Books that had long ago closed themselves out of boredom were sitting open, yawning in delight. A kettle he’d forgotten to fill years ago was now cheerfully steaming, as if it too had remembered its purpose.

Norbert stood in the center of it all, glowing ever so slightly, as if lit from the inside by a soft phosphorescence. The snortlepods, now happily tumbling about the room, releasing an explosion of giggles that was preserved for a millennia in those subterranean echo chambers. Words he’d once mumbled half-heartedly were now rising from hibernation, stretching, growing capes, and announcing their consonants with pride.

“I remember what I didn’t know how to forget,” Norbert later said in a room full of applause.

He was no longer just a cartographer of curious terrain. He was a geographer of the unsaid, a keeper of missing keys, a professor emeritus of half-thoughts and whole feelings.

And the best part? He hadn’t even unpacked his backpack yet.