The Book Of Ian Watson, page 7
I fed the 5-cent fruit machine in the motel foyer for a few minutes before introducing myself. I had no wish to seem to be a federal tax investigator. And I admired the replicas of the wooden leg inset with shotgun which Captain Coal Oil used in the Eighteen Eighties to back up his panhandling activities. Then I had myself shown into the brothers’ office.
They were wary at first.
“Gentlemen, I am enquiring from anyone who was working in the Pickwick Arms Hotel during April 1952 about a love affair I believe to have been committed (I was not quite sure of my English) between the cellist Anna Soleri and a man of letters called Borg.”
“Divorce case?”
Naturally I’d seen the many neon signs advertising quickie divorces along the main streets of Reno.
“No, nothing like that. I’m writing a biography.”
They warmed to me then, realizing that I had nothing to do with taxes or crimes—except perhaps a metaphysical crime, Anna Soleri’s subtraction of Borg from the space-time continuum …
They remembered that morning vividly.
“Crazy,” laughed the younger brother, a tanned handsome creature with fat rings on his hands and black curly hair—I wondered how many marriages those rings represented, as he flashed them about like trophies of conquests, a big-time gypsy. “This stunning blind bitch—golden hair, no make-up whatever, wasn’t so much as a lipstick on her dressing table, only perfume, a queer kind of herbal perfume, sharp and bitter—she was standing by the window listening to the traffic, her manager was there too and a number of admirers and some musicians among the vases of flowers. Then this small fellow, a bit dandified with a rose in his buttonhole, shirt open at the neck, two of the buttons ripped off, was weeping and begging her to pay attention to him—and she so cool, standing there listening to the cars and when her manager told this man to stop annoying her she turned to him and said calmly, Who are you talking to? Who are you talking to? I know where everyone is standing, by the echoes—and she pointed out one by one everybody in the room, even called some of them by name, though they’d been moving about and not talking much, she was as sharp as that at hearing their silhouettes. But she didn’t point at the man who was making so much noise and in the end the manager took her hand and pointed it in the right direction and asked her ‘What’s there?’—but she said confidently there’s nothing there, only the wall, the echoes are perfect. So then they told this man, Get out of here Mac you don’t exist, laughing at him. They didn’t treat it as serious, thinking this bitch was maybe just standing him up in a very cool way, but I saw there was more to it than that, she genuinely didn’t know he was there. Now my brother and I, we know something about the Occult—séances, ectoplasm—and it was as if he was just a materialisation or ghost that she didn’t sense because he was unreal. He called something out about them going to bed the night before—and I thought about incubi and they thought he was talking dirty and shouted at him to get out, angry now, and he left in a rage cursing them all …”
I turned to the elder brother who looked more like a professional businessman than his mercurial gypsy brother, but he too was a secret mystic.
“Surely you must have known who this man that claimed to be her lover really was? Wasn’t he staying in the same hotel?”
The elder brother smiled thinly.
“There are many mysteries in the world. A man may be a professor staying in a hotel, and at the same time be an evil spirit. No one seeing that woman defending herself against knowledge of the man but would know that a good spirit was standing between the two hiding his image from her!”
Soon after this I excused myself. The two brothers’ minds were twisted by mysticism (in the midst of that neon riot of materialism that was Reno!—but you will find the same thing all over California, whose cities are little more than vast outpourings of ephemeral ectoplasm).
Yet they had clearly seen more of what happened in that room than the other witnesses who could see no further than their own shabby lives of call-girls and one-night-stands. Something mysterious had occurred. A conceptual assassination. A casting out of heaven, in metaphysical terms.
Klossowski’s mad vengeance on the world began approximately nine months later. No doubt Borg, already embittered, saw its applications as he scanned those first braille texts with his fingers, remembering the touch of Anna’s body during that April night in the Pickwick Arms Hotel. But how exactly did he hope to apply the braille books? As seduction—or as revenge? Did he wish to punish the blind musician on some conceptual level? If she refused the direct acoustic signs of his existence he would provide her with the most indirect, yet powerful, tactile signs of it. Or did he mean to hew away at the texture of her amnesia itself, undermining its structure in order to win her?
By the terms of either scenario (and here’s where I must temporarily interpolate an ‘x’ to account for that long delay till the time of Anna Soleri’s death) the braille books would have arrived as anonymous gifts, anonymous so far as she was concerned since Borg did not exist—equivalent to those curious quests of medieval knights in the days of courtly love, when the search to placate the unattainable fair one (who may in reality have been some thoroughly commonplace hausfrau—but who only really existed for the lovesick knight on a plane of metaphor) could easily occupy a whole lifetime of hacking and hewing, riding, pitching tents, praying, torturing, chastity.
That such a medieval project might seem ludicrous today was beside the point. That it could only be carried through under a régime which permitted Borg to run his prison like a private torture farm of the mind … this must also seem beside the point to those international publishers whose agents are prepared to bid large sums for the right to transcribe and print Samuel Klossowski’s tortured bran-tub of perversions!
“Please don’t be naïve,” Borg pleaded the other week, a strange rapture coming over his face as he recounted Samuel Klossowski’s sufferings. “What does a lifetime in prison, a lifetime in solitary confinement even, what does this matter if it enables you to enter a wholly notional world, to reinvent the Nineteenth Century, and to believe till the very end that hundreds, thousands, of other people accept it as the very stuff of reality? That’s surely something. What would our friend Klossowski have achieved with his freedom in the outside world? A few paltry rapes. But inside, he conceived the rape of a whole society and executed it with perfect tact!”
A few paltry rapes! What an understatement for the most ingeniously executed and protracted series of private atrocities that have ever shocked the press into censoring itself! But I suppose anything that actually occurred must have seemed less than perfect to Borg who had had endless opportunity to reconstruct in all its infinite details and variations on these details a particular night in New York when a greater artist had subtracted him from existence by sheer force of mind. She had undreamed him, and the rest of his life would be devoted to dreaming himself back, with Klossowski acting as amanuensis: to breaking the spell and unjinxing himself and laying the jinx in turn on her. For (this is the ‘x’ in my equation) Borg actually mailed all these braille books, one by one, to Anna Soleri; and just as surely one by one they were returned, unopened, refused.
I managed to trace a former trustee prisoner who works as a locksmith in Vienna nowadays and who was in the prison post office.
A sad doomed city, Vienna, with its vast empty buildings and echoes. All night long in the former palace that was my hotel pigeons flew up and down the stairs throbbing dolefully. Down in the yard repairs were going on like work on a hopelessly hollow tooth. The walls were peeling, with great ulcers of exposed red brick.
As the light faded, a blank-faced peasant woman shook clothes out of a third-floor window meticulously. Her white muscles looked like fish on a slab. Such mute devotion in the way she handled the rags and shook the dust off them! In another window behind geraniums a mother was teaching her child to count. Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf … but fünf was too much for the child, maybe he couldn’t say the word, maybe five seemed like infinity to him. He waved his hand at me and the mother swung round abruptly, saw me, snatched the net curtains across.
And that night in the gloomy scabby palace I dreamt a savage story that seemed fearfully relevant to the Borgian aesthetics. It might have been put into my mind specially, as a warning …
I was with a party of tourists off the beaten track in Central America somewhere when we heard about the strange ceremonial of this tribe. It took place in a huge cave inside a mountain. There was only a tiny round hole to get in by, yet it wasn’t dark inside there; the walls shone with a dull phosphorescence. We looked up from the cave floor, saw wooden rickety stairs running out from each side towards each other but not meeting by ten or twenty feet. It was the bell loft of a great natural stone cathedral. But the bells! Two savages moved out up the stairways high above us, then launched themselves towards each other over space, clashed great shells together, rebounded. Each held a living shell with some animal inside it and it made a booming music. At first we listened, amused, and took photographs. But the tempo began to quicken then. The savages hurled themselves out to meet each other, bounced violently back. Again. And again. Then they collided awkwardly, hung in mid-air for a moment, fell. Nobody paid attention. Two more took their places. Clash clash clash! The living music of the shells went on burrowing into our skulls. Another savage slipped and crashed down to the pit under the vault and I realized, the shells are the masters, the shells are driving them on. But what happened to the shells when they fell? They cracked apart, hatched their hideous contents which had quickened to the music of the wild percussion. The soft God of the savages mounted one of those dead broken bodies like a snail and the dead man rose again, to God-head, his eyes closed and muscles twitching, and he walked about on his broken legs …
Next morning I went down to the Russian war memorial and walked about for a long time in the spray that freshened the dust of this dead city to cleanse myself, before calling on the locksmith.
Subsequently one of the questions I asked him was: “What was Borg’s reaction when the books came back?”
The fat locksmith squinted at me through his thick glasses.
“The first one that came back, he tore it open and searched through the pages of the book looking for something. Well I said to him, nothing inside but you put it there, Sir; that packet hasn’t been opened since it left here. And do you know, I really caught him off balance, he almost apologized to me. To me! ‘Yes, it’s funny, things that you send away become so estranged you don’t even know them again.’ Then he handed me another identical packet with the same name but a different address, Stockholm this time. And so it went on for as long as I was in the post office. One packet returned to sender, one new one sent out. Russia, America, Brazil, Lebanon. He used air-mail every time. If he’d have been trying to break out of jail, with his persistence, well!”
“But how did he know where she was each time?”
He shook his head, shrugged.
“Why did you think he sent her those books which she didn’t want?”
“God knows. The man was mad. Some hideous things happened in that prison. Not to people like me, but there were politicals … That sort of thing leaves a nasty taste.”
“Ever hear of a prisoner called Klossowski? Samuel Klossowski?”
The fat man considered, then shook his head.
“The name means nothing to me.”
He didn’t want to talk. But I had my missing link. The books had been sent.
That night, again, the emptiness of the city of Vienna horrified me. In place of its museums and parks of the daytime were great black holes surrounded by hacked-up roads like barricades. Buildings were pockmarked with bullet richochets. It seemed an appropriate place to end my quest for information. Borg’s life contained great dark holes too, which daylight revealed as parks and museums—aristocratic assemblages of concepts and artefacts with himself as their attendant and vampire, waiting for the nightfall of the soul. In his private park wandered the ghost of Anna Soleri, unable to see him, though he tracked her and tried to sink his teeth into her marble shoulder every evening, deaf to him though he whispered in her ear … On every pedestal rested volumes of Klossowski’s braille encyclopedia, open in case one day she should accidentally rest her hand on one of them, one hundred and seventy-seven elegant tar-babies …
And then, one day, she died. Her plane crashed outside Cincinnati. Klossowski had died of exhaustion the year before. But as soon as Anna Soleri died, Borg revealed Klossowski’s twisted genius to the public in a series of brilliant essays, and put his works up for auction as though they were his own, daring to argue that no one is in reality the author of a book, that of the new conceptual Sense and Sensibility Klossowski was no more the author than Miss Jane Austen. Why not consider Anna Soleri the authoress, for that matter! Authoress, too, of Klossowski’s sufferings. Nature hates a vacuum, and her successful bracketing off of Borg from nature left a void in concepts that needed to be filled … Such clever arguments displease me now, after my trip to Vienna and my dream of the savages—which I believe gave me a truer insight into Klossowski’s sufferings than Borg’s pious words.
The auction is going to take place on July 22nd at 2 P.M. in the Galleries Paz. I am enclosing a copy of the catalogue. If you care to send a donation soon there is a chance of saving at least one of Samuel Klossowski’s works from the indignity of a paperback edition, preferably his Sense and Sensibility, the new conceptual Justine. That will be something, don’t you agree?
A limited edition in Braille can then be run off, for those who symphathize with the story behind this story. Klossowski can be read as he meant himself to be read: through the fingertips. And we will enter the maze of dots to confront the minotaur.
A fictional linguistics …
The Love Song of
Johnny Alienson
How shall I sing my lovesong to you, Marianne? I’m dazzled by the numberless, nameless birds and blooms of this island of Tobago. I’m blinded by its white beaches. The soaring greenery of Pigeon Peak spears my heart with loneliness and homesickness. My palate is stunned by peppered pork, stuffed cascadura fish, fried iguanas. My throat burns with tots of rum. My ears are deafened by calypsos sung in my honour:
What you tell the man from the stars?
Lots of boys got Mas and Pas
Talking to them in all sorts of lingos
Aliens can’t speak ours, there’s the stingo!
Is a catalogue of bewilderments, exile and muteness an adequate lovesong? Can I woo you all in negatives, Marianne?
Nameless is what most flowers and birds of Tobago will remain for me, no matter how long we live here as man and wife. Likewise our love must become something nameless and unexpressed—just as soon as our first child is born. Thereafter, in our cottage by Turtle Beach, I may speak your Earth-tongue no more; I shall only talk in the speech of Homestar’s world, which you have no means of mastering, Marianne.
I shall talk to our offspring in my alien speech, and they will learn it after a fashion; and they will learn your own Earth-speech too. They’ll become somewhat bilingual. But to you, my love, I shall only speak through them; our babes will be our interpreters. Our bodies will talk to one another, Marianne, but not our mouths. Our lips will kiss, but won’t communicate. So here and now is the honeymoon of our voices, yours and mine. Here and now we can exchange the selfsame words such as you and I and love. Very soon the entwining of our limbs by night and the setting of the seed and its swelling inside of you will deafen us to one another. So let me now gush out this flood of Earth-speech, in adieu to all earthly words. Thus let me empty my throat of human sounds—as I shall empty my loins into you, my love.
At last I’m starting to appreciate how it was for my alien Dada and my human mother light years away on the world of my birthing.
Self-sacrifice? Supreme dedication? Greater love hath no person?
Or: a life of insanity?
Which?
I well recall the day when mummy-Sarah first broached the how and why of my existence; and of hers and Dada’s.
I was eight years old then, Homestar-style, and nothing about my home background struck me as extraordinary—for what did I have to compare with it?
Mummy had wedded Dada. Nothing weird in that. Nothing odd about the fact that my mother like me was softly white-skinned with auburn hair on her head, and brown eyes; whereas my Dada and everyone else in sight had hard yellow bodies without a wisp of hair, though their tall thin heads were crowned with stiff cocks’ combs, and the pupils of their eyes were amber bars.
Nothing exceptional in the fact that we dwelled in a great ceramic cradlehome slung from the branches of a stick of broccoli the size of the tallest earthly tree. Didn’t eveyone else dwell likewise, thereabouts? (Save for Cavern Clan, and Raft Clan moored on Unspeakable Lake.)
“It’s very very hard for Earth-humans to learn alien languages,” mummy-Sarah said to me. “It’s just as hard for aliens to learn Earth-speech, or the speech of any other alien race.”
“What’s an alien?”
“Dada is an alien.” Sarah frowned. “That’s to say, I am. You are. Here, we’re the aliens.”
“Oh.”
“Dada isn’t your body-father, Johnny. Your body-father was a human just like you and me. I arrived here impregnated.”
“But I talk to Dada and anyone else …”
“I don’t,” she murmured.
“It’s always kind of hard and it gives me headaches now and then and I say the wrong things in the wrong ways. But I manage.”
“You’re the best, Johnny.”
If I’d thought this through a bit more deeply, I might have worked out then and there that other human children were being raised on Homestar’s world in other marriages of human mother and alien Dada—and vice versa on Earth.
