The Combinations, page 110
it, a pair of lopsided megaphones hung on a sentry pole beside a tramshelter.
Like poisonous flowers, he thought. Triffids, maybe. A clock’s gibbous eye
floated in a haemorrhage of traffic-light red. The arrangement of hour & minute
hands made no sense. Perhaps, in some parallel world, they or it might’ve
offered a way out, a clear line of flight.* For some reason he thought about that
first night, with the Prof’s ghost on the snowbank. Something familiar, but not
quite. Always that element of disconnect. One drink too many & one drink too
few. For example, he recognised, on the far side of the “clearing,” the gates of
Strahov Monastery. No deadmen tonight, though. No signs of life either. And
there, across the way, Kepler & Brahe keeping silent vigil. Beyond, the dreck of
* “Like the tender blush of winter mornings & long summer evenings.” [:]
* But not in this world, where every step in the direction of the EXIT sign was an interest-bearing
debt. [:]
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suburbia. Some s social experiment that failed (like all the others): filing-
cabinet grey, anfractuous, amortised, a democracy of ones & zeros operated by
remote-control.* And how would a reasonable human being live in a box? Like
having your head surgically detached, wrapped in formica & set in concrete
before dumped in the river — but still aware (you think).* But did Němec count
as a reasonable human being?
With a vague feeling of trepidation, he waded out onto the too-perfect
illusion of a cobbled expanse, of rainslicked tarmac, of glistening tramtracks.
What would it’ve taken to shatter it, release Němec from his reverie? What
mysterious ordination of events? Had it not, all, long ago, been predetermined
thus? From the first cell division, the bisecting line, man walking erect, the
shadow of a mountain, the finger pointing at G.O.D.? Němec being, so to
speak, that finger?* But he himself was unaware of any of this. Approaching the
middle of “the clearing” by now, gazing up at the megaphones on their pole —
expecting, perhaps, some tremendous voice to speak to him, issue commands. As
once before. That night. Lying in the snow. But when the echo of his footsteps
faded, all Němec could hear was the sound of his own breathing. And even that
failed to convince him.
* The hidden diodes, resistors, capacitators, transistors of the secret T.E.S.L.A. / Š.V.E.J.K.
MINDMACHINE, points defining a periphery, now that the centre had disappeared? [:]
* Or the opposite — some sort of private decapitation machine, to sever all the connections, turn
off the constant noise, sit alone in the dark & hear nothing, see nothing, think nothing. Bliss! To
be able, at will, to exist the way an object exists… And at the end of it all, even the inert things
come alive, evolve through processes of intention, propel themselves forward across eons of time,
from appliance to organism, from polymer to complex manifold, each with some curious, inchoate
image of its perfectible self — like Mydlář’s axe, dreaming of the guillotine, the way the guillotine
dreams of the Model-T production-line, & the way it dreams of an I.B.M. computer, switching
the points on a hundredthousand rail-connections across this blacked-out continent, & the final,
God-machine, the blackhole metamorphosis, the Solution-to-End-All-Solutions. Yer eider widdus,
aw agennus, says the talkinghead in the idiotbox. Aye-aye chief… [:]
* How else to explain the persistence, down the ages, of this obsession with spires, towers, pillars,
columns, obelisks, statues both lifesize & colossal, cenotaphs, metronomes, plinths, weathervanes,
antennae, dowsing rods tuned to astral frequencies, phantom radio signals, Enochian Morse,
minuteman homing signals, nosecones & sonar blips & isotope decay, lighthouses, totem poles,
minarets, fetishes in which reside the mojos of the species, the genii locorum, the secret mind
transmitters, Id-Ego-Superego — Kelley’s lightning conductor, Kepler’s cosmoghoulery,
Kammler’s aggregated neutron kaleidoscope — & all for the sake of what? Pandemonium &
Guiltless laughter? Did all the weird conspiracies add-up in the end to nothing more than a
pedantic obsession with decline & ruin? A child’s-play pivotal truth waking-up to the absence of
rules in the universe, of civilisation advancing through mindless struggle — wheels-within-the-
ever-reinvented-wheel — like Arepo the hapless sower? Or Kammler, who whichever way you
looked at it, was surely dead. But did he finish the job in the end, or didn’t he? [:]
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52
___________
FAUSTBITCH
What you first recognised was her nakedness. Or rather, the nakedness of an
assemblage: of exposed body parts that stretched from the floor of the gallery to
the ceiling — heavily contrasted flesh tones shaped to suggest a mouth, a breast,
a pair of thighs, an earlobe, the nape of a neck, throat, navel, buttocks, a surgical
corset, twin pelvic bones, gravitating around the tensed muscular ridge of the
groin. What the mini-brochure you could pick up at a table inside the door said:
…The model’s body appears to be reconstructed from arbitrarily arranged
fragments, made coherent by the geometrical grid of a large metal cage, or
else the gauze of a curtain pressed against a telephoto lens. The face, neither
strictly human nor alien, reveals itself on closer inspection to be incomplete,
truncated, an effect that has been carefully premeditated by the photographer,
who flaunts his intimacy with the object of his camera’s dissections by having
enlarged the image to room-size dimensions…
The gallery itself could’ve been described as a “dislocated” series of white cubes,
to match all the dislocated physiology. The ceilings were all panelled with
opaque skylights. This last feature had been put to use as a wildly profane
simulacrum of stainedglass windows, in which the saints had predictably been
swapped for bits of dissected anatomy. The brochure had very particular things
to say about this:
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…All these bodies represent a transfigured map of the cosmos — a dream
constellation from the camera’s submind — revealing the secret logic of an
image capable of making itself real only by facets. What stands naked before
the viewer is not a woman, or even women, but a universal concept. To
perceive what it is, is to perceive something entirely without precedent,
something that requires the eye to be re-invented. Each figure evolves
punctually, by optical disjunction, metastasis, mutation. Perverse hybrids of
remote & mythical symbiotics intertwine. Whole genealogies of the universal
body unfold before our eyes. They depict nothing but are instead constituted, in
a circumvolving processes of generation, devirgination, invagination, like the
grafted genitalia of plants…
Which meant, Němec decided, fucking themselves. Just reading the stuff was like
participating in a kind of orgy by attrition. The word overload came readily to
mind. Maybe that was the intention. Like what they’d called the show, Alex
Steiner: Overexposed, which wasn’t much of a misnomer.
Němec scanned the rooms. In all, there must’ve been a couple of hundred
pictures hanging on the walls, all different sizes, all apparently done with
different equipment to go with the different “moods”: a Hasselblad, a Fex , a
Canon F-, a Flexaret, a Kodak disposable, a Casio QV-. There were
screenshots from a closed-circuit surveillance video, images re-photographed
from studio prints, from a movie screen, from a TV screen — unfocused, cut
across by lines of static, pixellated. There were photomontages cut from old
porno magazines, construction manuals, re-shot & blown-up. Distorted lenses,
multiple exposures, solarisations, photoshop jobs. One whole wall was given up
to nothing but polaroids. Another one to production stills from The Teratologists.
Even when the photographs weren’t strictly her, they were all, in one way
or another, versions of Alice Steinerová.
The actual Alice Steinerová was waiting at the far end of the gallery, in
front of a wall-sized portrait of herself, a black fake fur coat hanging from her
shoulders. Němec came up beside her.
‘D’you think justice has been done?’ she asked, without looking at him.
Her voice echoed in the gallery. There were only three other visitors,
standing in a group by the door. The gallery assistant, in blue pinstripe &
flaming hair, was hovering around them, trying to earn his commission. Němec
leant on his stick & took in the composition. He could smell Alice Steinerová’s
perfume. Citrus, acetone —
‘Whoever speaks about justice these days?’
Němec heard her snort derisively, but there was a faint smile on her lips.
‘Y’know what Viktor thinks?’ Alice said. ‘“Man’s forever searching for the
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one woman who is all aspects of the Eternal Lover.” And I quote.’
Viktor, as in Faktor. But before he could think the obvious thought, Alice
snatched the walking stick from his hand, so that he almost tipped over.
Teasingly she stepped back from him & laughed. Her voice rose —
‘It’s such a bunch of horseshit. I mean, where do men like him get that
stuff anyway? Can you even imagine what that means? All those fancy ideas,
once you get them undressed, are uglier than the Bride of Frankenstein. That
thing, there,’ she pointed Němec’s walkingstick at her naked doppelgänger, ‘is
what the Eternal Lover really looks like.’
Alice winked, took Němec’s arm & steered him towards the exit. Out in
the foyer, the gallery assistant & a young woman were kneeling on the floor,
unrolling prints. An office stood off to one side. The assistant & the young
woman both looked up when Alice & Němec came through, but didn’t stop
what they were doing. There were prints lying everywhere, like bodies left where
they’d fallen, reminded of mass-grave Vernichtungslager photos, some of them
large enough to fill a wall. On a table beside these were more pictures, shuffled
in a pile, magazine-size — headless, arms knotted, legs & genitals splayed —
Alice im Wunderland visions of little hands dextersinister, vermillioned mouths,
pimply arses, breasts poutpointed, pubises downed black-brown-blonde, the tiny
pink verboten shitwhiffing anuses, like the fragmented nocturnal doubles of all
those doe-eyed, sloe-eyed Hankas, Lenkas, Katkas, Michaelas, Verunkas,
Johankas, Lučinkas, Aničkas, Pavlas, Barboras, Brigitas, Petras, Milenkas,
Bohuškas of lost ineffable childhoods, sullied in nightsatined, charblacked,
sootstained light — allegories of lost innocence & all that.
Alice pointed into the office. Grey light shifted through the horizontal
bands of a Venetian blind & the vertical pleats of a drawn curtain. Street sounds
echoed through the half open window behind them: a man’s voice, a radio, a car
engine starting & the sound of the car pulling off down the street. The assistant
got up off the floor & followed them into the office. He grinned at Alice, they
seemed to know one another. There were more pictures on the walls. Němec
ogled them. Behind a desk was a large colour print, about one-&-a-half by two
metres. It showed a naked woman behind a curtain of loosely woven netting,
body arched in electroshock. Beside it, a row of similar pictures, smaller in scale.
Rayographs, electric bodies, skin colour-saturated to the point of abstraction.
Once again Alice had been distorted beyond recognition, her identity transposed
onto other bodies, other body structures, ornamented with tattoos, piercings,
graftings, fine traceries of scar tissue, prosthetic bulges, lips, eyelids, labia, red &
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green mandala patterns swirling.
On the opposite wall & filling most of it was an entirely different kind of
image. It showed a bare room lit by late afternoon sunlight falling through
several small regular windowpanes. Through the windowpanes, the sky was
unusually bright. On a mahogany parquet floor, there were three elongated
rectangles of light, each broken into smaller rectangles by the parquet. Lying
lengthwise across the photograph, & intersected by the planes of light, was the
face & torso of a woman (Alice Steinerová’s ectopic twin?) sheathed in a
translucent green mesh. The mesh was so fine it almost appeared to be a trick of
light. Her head had been angled downwards, so that her eyes appeared closed,
but could easily not have been. A loose braid of hair had been arranged above
the left breast, forming a cryptic monogram. Lying beside this version of Alice
Steinerová on the floor was a coil of electrical wire unravelled in the approximate
shape of a treble clef — while around her breasts, a length of cord wound tight
in a cinched figure-eight.
The whole composition had a premeditated & ritualistic appearance, like
a highspeed snapshot of a nightmare in progress. As Němec stepped closer to
the picture, he realised that Alice was leaning against the doorframe with folded
arms, watching, as though she was making a study of him. Her whole face had
become a mask of tension. There was something about her look & that image —
something between them he couldn’t situate — like an erotic secret.
‘In the end,’ Alice said, ‘what’ll be left of us to judge, but our images?’
She raised her eyebrow as if posing the question other than rhetorically.
Němec tried to think of something to say, but couldn’t. What the Prof said: The
Image, with a capital I, is like religion: it buries History. Alice pointed his stick at
her bound double —
‘Alex met that one at the clinic,’ Alice said. ‘A patient, like me. Bipolar.
Topped herself.’
Němec looked back at the face in the picture. It wasn’t Alice anymore, but
a complete stranger. Perhaps none of them were her. He felt, for a moment, that
he’d been standing on the edge of a precipice, & had only managed to pull back
at the last moment. He said —
‘What’s the Doctor think about that?’
‘…’
‘People pay for this sort of thing?’
‘It’s meant to be art, not pornography.’
‘Pornography’s in the eye of the beholder,’ he said.
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Or what was really porn was the Dick & Jane routine the normalisation
freaks tried to zap on everyone else’s dirty secrets. Besides, you’d never know
from the picture that the dead girl was schizo. Was it more arousing that way?
Where’d the eye stop? At the image, or the story you sold it with? Alice gave a
derisive snort —
‘Pornography’s what you intend.’
‘Does Volta make a habit of pimping out his patients?’
‘You’re one of his patients, you tell me.’
‘I’m not in any of your brother’s snuff pics.’
‘Yet.’
Someone laughed. Němec turned to see the gallery assistant draping an
arm across Alice’s shoulders —
‘You ask me,’ the assistant said, nodding at the dead girl’s picture, hair like
a devil’s horns tapering up from the sides of his head, ‘it’s the image that
matters, stripping it bare, no gimmicks.’
He leered —
‘Anything that tries to be art makes me want to puke.’
‘Nakedness, he thinks,’ Alice pushed the assistant’s arm away, ‘is the
essential condition for truth.’
‘The secret,’ the assistant winked, ‘is knowing which is which.’
Barely had the leaves fallen from the trees…
when snow swept in from the east. A very fine icy snow falling against the
windows with a sound like TV static / water evaporating on a hotplate / a
woman pulling on a pair of stockings. For “old times’ sake” Alice suggested the
bar behind the Zrcadlo Theatre, it was only a couple of blocks away but the
place was packed with an early Friday Night crowd so they went downstairs to a
basement joint called The Richter. The Richter was only marginally less crowded
& humid as a watery lung. Němec brushed the snow off his hat & peered
through the smoke haze at a single long room with a bar at one end & a stage at
the other. Low vaulted ceiling. Candles on tables. A character in a -gallon
Stetson was blowing on a saxophone while a fat woman in some sort of
burlesque arrangement gargled into a microphone. She could just about hold a
note together. Němec winced. Belly of the whale, kiddo. Just do like Jonah…
