The Combinations, page 114
* Not to speak ill of the woman, her being dead after all & long in the tooth at that (or did he
mean “fingernails”?). [:]
741
then light again. Alice on the ceiling like Kokoschka’s porno prosthesis sullying
the predelectible prelude to a migraine of the very first order. A red light flashed
inside his head. That story, he remembered, not without pain, about one of the
th grade kids at the Home they’d dragged off to Bohnice for refusing to serve
in the Red Pioneers. Tied to a bed & fried in the brain with electrodes to help
clear his conscience. Němec wondered vaguely if the shocks made the pain better
or worse. He closed his eyes, rolled off the campbed & crawled to the kitchen
sink. Groped. SERTRALINE HYDROCHLORIDE, said the blue pills with
no serial number.
Hey there, kiddo, what’s new?
Sniffing around in the trash. Some aroma he’d managed to generate in
there with all that decomposing & composting. The rot after the inundation,
swamp vapours condensing on windowpanes. The fetid folios of cruciverbalist
cacaphagy. To think his very existence boiled down to this (!). It was enough to
bring tears to his eyes. If only these situations could solve themselves & point
him towards the exit doors, like a cavedweller blinking in the brights & What ho?
A light from yonder window & the Weather Lady tucking herself into a cosy
little Low Front, faint evocations of Cimabue over the rooftops, the odd
auriolated snowflake as once upon Bethlehem. Somewhere a dog groaned,
having a nightmare in its sleep. Rats in the attic. Old women whispered outside
the door. The heartbeat of somebody listening. Footsteps on the stairs. Workers’
boots. A jackdaw pecking at the window to be let in, or a shape on a scaffold.
Voices circling like flies in the middle of a room, buzzing buzzing, beneath a
dead lightbulb, buzzing buzzing buzzing buzzing…*
The best Němec could manage was to stand up. Vitiated, leached of all
will to [fill in the blank]. Like someone who’d just got wind of the news, that
humanity’d hit Brenschluß & was now in evolutionary reverse — hell, maybe
find that Missing Link on the backswing. He tapped cold water into a sticky
glass. Sipped. Gagged. Forced that hair-tongue of his to swallow. When he put
* How long had he been like this? Thursday. Monday. Drunk again. Here’s lookin’ at you, kiddo.
Lying there upsidedown in his own private Antipodes. Gravity isn’t a variable. Well hallelujah!
Did you count the windows? They still all there? Five down, three across. In a void, acceleration is
constant. Between this world and the next… Bzzz. First things first. Mind your own reticule. The
squill of him! Where they come from…? No good if you can’t enjoy it. Say please. Ta, love. It’s
mama’s choice. Love at first feel. Well you can’t judge a book by its… Bzzzz. A weight off your…
Tomorrow, maybe. What’s the furthest place possible? Asinine. Bzzzzz. Only counting what’s not
allowed. Anyone out there? Wind, rime, wet earth. Am I… Bzzzzzz. Have you…? Bzzzzzzzzzzz. [:]
742
the glass on the counter there were thin strings of blood coiling at the bottom…
‘Well hello, looks like we have a winner! We were worried there for a
minute, chum, didn’t think you had a drop left in you. Now check this out. Over
here we’ve got a whole range of stainless dripdry alteregos to choose from & any
one of them can be yours just for the asking. I don’t mind telling you, chum, this
is your lucky day. Just look at that streamlined bit of sucky sentimentality up
there! Or this hard-as-nails butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-arsehole Man for All
Occasions right at the front. Or maybe this’s more your style, last year’s model
admittedly, but a great fave with the spending public — that’s right & it comes
with a Full Unlimited-Mileage Lifetime Guarantee — voted Best-Loved Brand
ten years running: it’s the Garbage-Wrapped Sack of Shit, of course! I bought
one of these for my own kid, he loves it to death. Used to think he was Jean
Cocteau, hehe — a Cocteau in the hand’s worth two in the bush, hehehe — but
now he’s got a crystal-clear perspective on what really matters. And I can see
you’ve travelled that very same kind of road yourself, chum. Am I right? Of
course I am! No point letting bygones be a lion in your path. In the immortal
words of Cicero, Don’t blow it! This is your one real chance at being human, why
toss it all in the can just for some high-class chimp in crotchless wellies & a
French maid’s outfit? Listen chum, I’ve been there too & let me tell you a few
Home Truths, hehehehe. You want to wind up as a pair of kosher cobblers boiled
in goulash? Nothing wasted, nothing gained! That’s my personal motto & it
could be yours, too. All you’ve got to do is choose. That’s right, chum, the
choice is yours. Now, no matter which way you end up swinging the bat, we’ve
got our own Quality Certified Eight-Step Plan to go with it, just to ensure you
get the most out of your experience. And even better, you don’t have to worry
about any of those confusing payment schemes up front, we won’t bill you till
we’re satisfied that you’re satisfied. At KOSHER KOCHKA’s, the customer
always comes first , hehehehehe. Okay, hit it boys…!’
Some sort of crazy klezmer quartet popped up from nowhere making
matzo out of Mahler’s marinated Totenlieder.* Jesus, do I have to listen to this
stuff? Němec reeled away from wherever he thought he was at that moment, still
the taste of blood in his throat, like the taste of childhood. Mmm. Those
exquisite nosebleeds in the infirmary, Ol’ Deathbed hissing in his ear, Scheming
little shite! I’ll send you somewhere they deal with filth like you good and proper. It
would’ve made him laugh, if he wasn’t gagging instead. And that voice, like a
* “There were nine in the bed & the Little One said, Roll over!” [:]
743
bellowing oxymoron (you stole that, didn’t you?), enough to split the fontanel of
any God-fearing sonofabitch — like those bloody airraid sirens blasting away at
the weekly Civil Defence Drill! Wuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh! And how he’d
always wind-up somehow flat on his back with a wad of clotted bogroll under his
schnozzola. Hey, look, Squillbrain’s spazzed-out again! Waking up only to find
briny Ol’ Deathbed leering down at him like that was half the Dead Sea she had
up there under her skirts on a bed of pilau rice & if he didn’t Foxtrot Oscar
super quick she’d make salted strips out of him, just you wait and see. Ah, all the
pleasantest thoughts coming back! How about we just lie down here for a little
while and dream of something else, eh? Forehead to the scuffed linoleum, letting
the bad blood drain out. It pooled there, warm then cold, sticking at the edges to
his face. And what was that old Soviet joke about pissing in your boots? Fuck it.
He let his body go slack. Bit-by-bit the pain in his head became a sort of thing, a
solid object surrounded by dark space. He could’ve picked it up & held it in his
hands, turned it over, scrutinised it, if he hadn’t been lying flat on his face. It was
simply there. And being there it was, so to speak, nowhere.
�
You drift & drift & if the philosophers were right something would come out of
it. Aces in the hole? Some colourless odourless metaphysical excrescence?
Something, in other words, to lighten the load? Things don’t just disappear by
themselves, kiddo.* Though once upon a time — oh yes, once upon a time — a
man could step off into the abyss & never have to look back, eh? Rome could
burn while Nero fiddled. There could be patents for selfwinding clocks. And up
there behind the blue of noon’s arras & heaven’s fire, God’s theoretical blackhole
would shine, shine on, like some crazy diamond. Because none of this is real, it’s all
a sham, it was always a sham! Hearing the Old Man’s Klassenzimmer-voice
saying how it’d come to pass that He learned to see the world through eyes of
mud & clay. And how He slept without fear of ever having to know himself
again. But one day His Doppelgänger took its revenge by choosing to die. And
all the ghosts of God’s former existence returned to Him & drove Him mad.*
* One should always keep in mind, for example, the Law of Conservation of Mass (A. Lavoisier,
1789). [:]
* Or one day He woke up. For the truth was that all along He’d been imprisoned inside a dream &
it suddenly dawned on Him that in order to be free He’d first need to build a Wall. And the Wall
744
The music stopped. The cosmic ear snored instead. Němec rolled over
onto his beetleback. Sehr Kafkaesque. And how’s the asbestos business going, old
cock? (Jesus, the guy was like a one-man tuberculosis pandemic with a Brooks
Brothers fixation, & you think you’ve got it bad?) Němec opened his eyes
(again). The scenery hadn’t changed much. Peeled himself off the floor.
Gropingly affirmed the major chakras were more or less in alignment. A bloody
blatant big gap in his head, though, where the brain was supposed to be, haha.
Well that’s a fine mess he’s made, isn’t it? Scrounging in the bin for something
to wipe it all up with. Gibberish in rows & columns. That’s it, smear it all nicely
around. Rorschach splodges of something unspeakable. What was that? Some
sort of medieval doodle of the Burning Bush? Nebuchadnezzar’s misses among
the potted shrubbery? The who? Her of Babylon? Mary, Mary, quite cuntrary?
Or just the biggest piece of creationist cooze since Eve knocked one off with the
old Monty Python act up the Tree of Seditious Knowledge (that gang of
infamous lesbian penis-impersonators!), otherwise known as “Heavy Heva” —
witch, succubus & most devastating lay this side of Gethsemane — in her
umpteenth incarnation as a pre-Warhol Elizabeth Taylor in gold-lamé (yep, that
film). What can I say, Tony? I guess I’m just a material girl. Asp tattoo with its fang buried in her left tit, inscribèd thus: “Dulce et decorum est pro Cleopatria mori.”
And that old bore in the rubber Richard Burton mask spoiling the scene again…
Němec interrupted the broadcast to go out & put his head under the
shower. Counted to a hundred. Got lost. Gave up. The reflection at the bottom
of the bath stared up at him through a film of scum like a mezzotint of a man
with his head in a hole. Smile kiddo. Say cheese. Teeth cracked, bloodied gums.
His hands were made of rubber. He held on. He grinned. He said cheese.
�
Wasn’t it about time for the Prof’s pantogeist to put in one of its irregular
appearances, just to shift gears or something, give the plot a bit of direction, take
the protagonist’s mind off his own mindlessness for a minute or two? No? Too
much to ask? In the meantime, then, how about a quick joke? Ever hear the one
about the Politburo guy, was so fat that every time he went to the Black Sea for
his summer holidays he had to take a goddamn receipt?
was with God. [:]
745
For a long time Němec stood there in the bath before he decided sitting
would do just as well, only now he had a wet arse in addition to a migraine /
hangover / general putrefaction of the mental faculties, etc. Mahler echoed
through the rooms, as was Mahler’s wont. In diesem Wetter, in diesem Saus, / Nie
hät’ ich gesendet die Kinder hinaus! Němec waited for the record to end &, when it
did, he waited (like us) to see what else might happen. Borrowed ink-suit hat
walkingstick bundled in the corner over there beneath the window like a pointer
pointing at sfumato’d palimpsests of abolished erasure, tenebrous chemas,
blotted algebras, caliginous calligraphies, obfuscated oraculations all. Okay, but
what about the ghost? Ghost was a no-show, of course, probably just a hoax
anyway, figment of Squillhead’s squillhead, hunched there with his mouth open
bothering the flies. Perhaps he was trying to meet the old vapour halfway, put on
his best impersonation of a stiff to create a more sympathetic kind of
atmosphere? Maybe he was trying to become him, finger on the rewind back to
the sign-off scene in the bath, Prof sitting there with knees up (’cause the tub
was too short, as Němec himself could readily attest), flies in his eyes, in his
unhinged jaw, rubbing their legs together in that grossly licentious way so typical
of the lower Schizophora, preening their wings, nozzling their probosces,
smearing pathogens about with obnoxious abandon. Walls mottled grey in the
November light. Grey scum on the water. Halo of redeyed flies overhead. And,
like some ancient Zen master with a pair of chopsticks, the deadman, very
slowly, imperceptible almost, reaching up from watery sleep to blindly pluck a
nice fat one bodily from the air between thumb & index finger. A soft crunch &
then the fly dropping onto the floating chessboard — like him, playing dead.
Just the thought of all that water & all those flies was enough to make
Němec thirsty all over again. Knowing how mysteriously the spirit moved, it was
a damn good thing he’d put in a supply after Alice Steinerová’s vanishing act, to
keep his levels balanced, so to speak, his keels even. The question was where?
He’d probably hidden the stuff, out of some heat-of-the-moment conspiracy
paranoia about thieving dwarfs. Or maybe that was a bottle of the stuff right
there on the windowsill beside the carton of milk? (And what was a carton of
milk doing in the bathroom, you may well ask? Collecting flies, of course.)
Němec got his legs back under him & went over to sniff the milk. A bit on the
nose, but no more than was reasonable. He chugged some curds. Even a semi-
pro like him could only gain from a bit of the old alkali in the gastrointestinals.
He tossed the empty carton in the sink & cracked the bottle. Mmmmmmmm.
(Fuckin’ oath, as reportedly they say in Tasmania.) Němec took another swig, a
746
real one this time. Almost immediately he felt like twice the man he’d felt just a
moment before. The contents of that bottle certainly did seem to possess a
number of magical restorative properties. With the third swig he felt man
enough even to confront the task of getting dressed. Now the existence of such
magical properties was a Truth that ought to’ve been universally acknowledged
by this point in History & unrequiring of that constant beating-around-the-bush
we’ve been witnessing lately, but then that’d spoil the whole joy-of-discovery
thing, wouldn’t it? Like pulling up through the g-forces on your first take-off &
then levelling-out at feet. Mmmmm. Big blue farkakte sky up there above all
that grey. And did Truth prevail? Listen chumsky, that tune’s as stale at Klem
Gottwald’s headcheese. Well, there’s always someone willing to do the Lord’s work
& piss on your parade, isn’t there? But this page’s only big enough for one
smartarse at a time, so breeze, pal.
Time for a limerick yet?
There once was a poor puss called Oskar
who slipped his shvantz to a kochka.
The kochka had fangs
and gnawed off his wang,
so now he’s just half a Kokoschka, dah-dum.
Or as Tell Me, Doctor’s Winifred May de Kok always said at the end of the show,
Remember kids, a kok in die hand is die meite werd twee in ’n termiethoop! And what
better advice could you hope for your children in a world such as ours beset by
doubt & insecurity? There are so few role models we can really feel confident
turning to in this day & age, where intemperate immodesty & unbridled lust
tear at the very fabric of our civilisation. But no matter how low you sink, you
can always turn to Winifred May de Kok. Don’t succumb to the scourge of
disillusionment! Pick up the phone & dial now. All major credit cards accepted.
Why feel alone, when you can share your anxieties with likeminded sufferers in
our friendly chatline community? Call now & if you’re not satisfied, we won’t be
satisfied either.
Oh ho! And look, there’s little cockeyed Koko with that pealed
chickenneck poking from his pants — obviously missed out on the inspirational
talk just back there, feeling all alone & insufficient. See what he’s been reduced
to, hanging around the crossroads like a bad smell trying to strike a deal with the
Man. Man gotta be able to sell him somethin’ more substantial down there, if
anyone can. He’d give an arm & a leg, anything! Just so long as he can slip the
747
love of his miserable existence the Real Deal — light up those pinball eyes of
mean “fingernails”?). [:]
741
then light again. Alice on the ceiling like Kokoschka’s porno prosthesis sullying
the predelectible prelude to a migraine of the very first order. A red light flashed
inside his head. That story, he remembered, not without pain, about one of the
th grade kids at the Home they’d dragged off to Bohnice for refusing to serve
in the Red Pioneers. Tied to a bed & fried in the brain with electrodes to help
clear his conscience. Němec wondered vaguely if the shocks made the pain better
or worse. He closed his eyes, rolled off the campbed & crawled to the kitchen
sink. Groped. SERTRALINE HYDROCHLORIDE, said the blue pills with
no serial number.
Hey there, kiddo, what’s new?
Sniffing around in the trash. Some aroma he’d managed to generate in
there with all that decomposing & composting. The rot after the inundation,
swamp vapours condensing on windowpanes. The fetid folios of cruciverbalist
cacaphagy. To think his very existence boiled down to this (!). It was enough to
bring tears to his eyes. If only these situations could solve themselves & point
him towards the exit doors, like a cavedweller blinking in the brights & What ho?
A light from yonder window & the Weather Lady tucking herself into a cosy
little Low Front, faint evocations of Cimabue over the rooftops, the odd
auriolated snowflake as once upon Bethlehem. Somewhere a dog groaned,
having a nightmare in its sleep. Rats in the attic. Old women whispered outside
the door. The heartbeat of somebody listening. Footsteps on the stairs. Workers’
boots. A jackdaw pecking at the window to be let in, or a shape on a scaffold.
Voices circling like flies in the middle of a room, buzzing buzzing, beneath a
dead lightbulb, buzzing buzzing buzzing buzzing…*
The best Němec could manage was to stand up. Vitiated, leached of all
will to [fill in the blank]. Like someone who’d just got wind of the news, that
humanity’d hit Brenschluß & was now in evolutionary reverse — hell, maybe
find that Missing Link on the backswing. He tapped cold water into a sticky
glass. Sipped. Gagged. Forced that hair-tongue of his to swallow. When he put
* How long had he been like this? Thursday. Monday. Drunk again. Here’s lookin’ at you, kiddo.
Lying there upsidedown in his own private Antipodes. Gravity isn’t a variable. Well hallelujah!
Did you count the windows? They still all there? Five down, three across. In a void, acceleration is
constant. Between this world and the next… Bzzz. First things first. Mind your own reticule. The
squill of him! Where they come from…? No good if you can’t enjoy it. Say please. Ta, love. It’s
mama’s choice. Love at first feel. Well you can’t judge a book by its… Bzzzz. A weight off your…
Tomorrow, maybe. What’s the furthest place possible? Asinine. Bzzzzz. Only counting what’s not
allowed. Anyone out there? Wind, rime, wet earth. Am I… Bzzzzzz. Have you…? Bzzzzzzzzzzz. [:]
742
the glass on the counter there were thin strings of blood coiling at the bottom…
‘Well hello, looks like we have a winner! We were worried there for a
minute, chum, didn’t think you had a drop left in you. Now check this out. Over
here we’ve got a whole range of stainless dripdry alteregos to choose from & any
one of them can be yours just for the asking. I don’t mind telling you, chum, this
is your lucky day. Just look at that streamlined bit of sucky sentimentality up
there! Or this hard-as-nails butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-arsehole Man for All
Occasions right at the front. Or maybe this’s more your style, last year’s model
admittedly, but a great fave with the spending public — that’s right & it comes
with a Full Unlimited-Mileage Lifetime Guarantee — voted Best-Loved Brand
ten years running: it’s the Garbage-Wrapped Sack of Shit, of course! I bought
one of these for my own kid, he loves it to death. Used to think he was Jean
Cocteau, hehe — a Cocteau in the hand’s worth two in the bush, hehehe — but
now he’s got a crystal-clear perspective on what really matters. And I can see
you’ve travelled that very same kind of road yourself, chum. Am I right? Of
course I am! No point letting bygones be a lion in your path. In the immortal
words of Cicero, Don’t blow it! This is your one real chance at being human, why
toss it all in the can just for some high-class chimp in crotchless wellies & a
French maid’s outfit? Listen chum, I’ve been there too & let me tell you a few
Home Truths, hehehehe. You want to wind up as a pair of kosher cobblers boiled
in goulash? Nothing wasted, nothing gained! That’s my personal motto & it
could be yours, too. All you’ve got to do is choose. That’s right, chum, the
choice is yours. Now, no matter which way you end up swinging the bat, we’ve
got our own Quality Certified Eight-Step Plan to go with it, just to ensure you
get the most out of your experience. And even better, you don’t have to worry
about any of those confusing payment schemes up front, we won’t bill you till
we’re satisfied that you’re satisfied. At KOSHER KOCHKA’s, the customer
always comes first , hehehehehe. Okay, hit it boys…!’
Some sort of crazy klezmer quartet popped up from nowhere making
matzo out of Mahler’s marinated Totenlieder.* Jesus, do I have to listen to this
stuff? Němec reeled away from wherever he thought he was at that moment, still
the taste of blood in his throat, like the taste of childhood. Mmm. Those
exquisite nosebleeds in the infirmary, Ol’ Deathbed hissing in his ear, Scheming
little shite! I’ll send you somewhere they deal with filth like you good and proper. It
would’ve made him laugh, if he wasn’t gagging instead. And that voice, like a
* “There were nine in the bed & the Little One said, Roll over!” [:]
743
bellowing oxymoron (you stole that, didn’t you?), enough to split the fontanel of
any God-fearing sonofabitch — like those bloody airraid sirens blasting away at
the weekly Civil Defence Drill! Wuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh! And how he’d
always wind-up somehow flat on his back with a wad of clotted bogroll under his
schnozzola. Hey, look, Squillbrain’s spazzed-out again! Waking up only to find
briny Ol’ Deathbed leering down at him like that was half the Dead Sea she had
up there under her skirts on a bed of pilau rice & if he didn’t Foxtrot Oscar
super quick she’d make salted strips out of him, just you wait and see. Ah, all the
pleasantest thoughts coming back! How about we just lie down here for a little
while and dream of something else, eh? Forehead to the scuffed linoleum, letting
the bad blood drain out. It pooled there, warm then cold, sticking at the edges to
his face. And what was that old Soviet joke about pissing in your boots? Fuck it.
He let his body go slack. Bit-by-bit the pain in his head became a sort of thing, a
solid object surrounded by dark space. He could’ve picked it up & held it in his
hands, turned it over, scrutinised it, if he hadn’t been lying flat on his face. It was
simply there. And being there it was, so to speak, nowhere.
�
You drift & drift & if the philosophers were right something would come out of
it. Aces in the hole? Some colourless odourless metaphysical excrescence?
Something, in other words, to lighten the load? Things don’t just disappear by
themselves, kiddo.* Though once upon a time — oh yes, once upon a time — a
man could step off into the abyss & never have to look back, eh? Rome could
burn while Nero fiddled. There could be patents for selfwinding clocks. And up
there behind the blue of noon’s arras & heaven’s fire, God’s theoretical blackhole
would shine, shine on, like some crazy diamond. Because none of this is real, it’s all
a sham, it was always a sham! Hearing the Old Man’s Klassenzimmer-voice
saying how it’d come to pass that He learned to see the world through eyes of
mud & clay. And how He slept without fear of ever having to know himself
again. But one day His Doppelgänger took its revenge by choosing to die. And
all the ghosts of God’s former existence returned to Him & drove Him mad.*
* One should always keep in mind, for example, the Law of Conservation of Mass (A. Lavoisier,
1789). [:]
* Or one day He woke up. For the truth was that all along He’d been imprisoned inside a dream &
it suddenly dawned on Him that in order to be free He’d first need to build a Wall. And the Wall
744
The music stopped. The cosmic ear snored instead. Němec rolled over
onto his beetleback. Sehr Kafkaesque. And how’s the asbestos business going, old
cock? (Jesus, the guy was like a one-man tuberculosis pandemic with a Brooks
Brothers fixation, & you think you’ve got it bad?) Němec opened his eyes
(again). The scenery hadn’t changed much. Peeled himself off the floor.
Gropingly affirmed the major chakras were more or less in alignment. A bloody
blatant big gap in his head, though, where the brain was supposed to be, haha.
Well that’s a fine mess he’s made, isn’t it? Scrounging in the bin for something
to wipe it all up with. Gibberish in rows & columns. That’s it, smear it all nicely
around. Rorschach splodges of something unspeakable. What was that? Some
sort of medieval doodle of the Burning Bush? Nebuchadnezzar’s misses among
the potted shrubbery? The who? Her of Babylon? Mary, Mary, quite cuntrary?
Or just the biggest piece of creationist cooze since Eve knocked one off with the
old Monty Python act up the Tree of Seditious Knowledge (that gang of
infamous lesbian penis-impersonators!), otherwise known as “Heavy Heva” —
witch, succubus & most devastating lay this side of Gethsemane — in her
umpteenth incarnation as a pre-Warhol Elizabeth Taylor in gold-lamé (yep, that
film). What can I say, Tony? I guess I’m just a material girl. Asp tattoo with its fang buried in her left tit, inscribèd thus: “Dulce et decorum est pro Cleopatria mori.”
And that old bore in the rubber Richard Burton mask spoiling the scene again…
Němec interrupted the broadcast to go out & put his head under the
shower. Counted to a hundred. Got lost. Gave up. The reflection at the bottom
of the bath stared up at him through a film of scum like a mezzotint of a man
with his head in a hole. Smile kiddo. Say cheese. Teeth cracked, bloodied gums.
His hands were made of rubber. He held on. He grinned. He said cheese.
�
Wasn’t it about time for the Prof’s pantogeist to put in one of its irregular
appearances, just to shift gears or something, give the plot a bit of direction, take
the protagonist’s mind off his own mindlessness for a minute or two? No? Too
much to ask? In the meantime, then, how about a quick joke? Ever hear the one
about the Politburo guy, was so fat that every time he went to the Black Sea for
his summer holidays he had to take a goddamn receipt?
was with God. [:]
745
For a long time Němec stood there in the bath before he decided sitting
would do just as well, only now he had a wet arse in addition to a migraine /
hangover / general putrefaction of the mental faculties, etc. Mahler echoed
through the rooms, as was Mahler’s wont. In diesem Wetter, in diesem Saus, / Nie
hät’ ich gesendet die Kinder hinaus! Němec waited for the record to end &, when it
did, he waited (like us) to see what else might happen. Borrowed ink-suit hat
walkingstick bundled in the corner over there beneath the window like a pointer
pointing at sfumato’d palimpsests of abolished erasure, tenebrous chemas,
blotted algebras, caliginous calligraphies, obfuscated oraculations all. Okay, but
what about the ghost? Ghost was a no-show, of course, probably just a hoax
anyway, figment of Squillhead’s squillhead, hunched there with his mouth open
bothering the flies. Perhaps he was trying to meet the old vapour halfway, put on
his best impersonation of a stiff to create a more sympathetic kind of
atmosphere? Maybe he was trying to become him, finger on the rewind back to
the sign-off scene in the bath, Prof sitting there with knees up (’cause the tub
was too short, as Němec himself could readily attest), flies in his eyes, in his
unhinged jaw, rubbing their legs together in that grossly licentious way so typical
of the lower Schizophora, preening their wings, nozzling their probosces,
smearing pathogens about with obnoxious abandon. Walls mottled grey in the
November light. Grey scum on the water. Halo of redeyed flies overhead. And,
like some ancient Zen master with a pair of chopsticks, the deadman, very
slowly, imperceptible almost, reaching up from watery sleep to blindly pluck a
nice fat one bodily from the air between thumb & index finger. A soft crunch &
then the fly dropping onto the floating chessboard — like him, playing dead.
Just the thought of all that water & all those flies was enough to make
Němec thirsty all over again. Knowing how mysteriously the spirit moved, it was
a damn good thing he’d put in a supply after Alice Steinerová’s vanishing act, to
keep his levels balanced, so to speak, his keels even. The question was where?
He’d probably hidden the stuff, out of some heat-of-the-moment conspiracy
paranoia about thieving dwarfs. Or maybe that was a bottle of the stuff right
there on the windowsill beside the carton of milk? (And what was a carton of
milk doing in the bathroom, you may well ask? Collecting flies, of course.)
Němec got his legs back under him & went over to sniff the milk. A bit on the
nose, but no more than was reasonable. He chugged some curds. Even a semi-
pro like him could only gain from a bit of the old alkali in the gastrointestinals.
He tossed the empty carton in the sink & cracked the bottle. Mmmmmmmm.
(Fuckin’ oath, as reportedly they say in Tasmania.) Němec took another swig, a
746
real one this time. Almost immediately he felt like twice the man he’d felt just a
moment before. The contents of that bottle certainly did seem to possess a
number of magical restorative properties. With the third swig he felt man
enough even to confront the task of getting dressed. Now the existence of such
magical properties was a Truth that ought to’ve been universally acknowledged
by this point in History & unrequiring of that constant beating-around-the-bush
we’ve been witnessing lately, but then that’d spoil the whole joy-of-discovery
thing, wouldn’t it? Like pulling up through the g-forces on your first take-off &
then levelling-out at feet. Mmmmm. Big blue farkakte sky up there above all
that grey. And did Truth prevail? Listen chumsky, that tune’s as stale at Klem
Gottwald’s headcheese. Well, there’s always someone willing to do the Lord’s work
& piss on your parade, isn’t there? But this page’s only big enough for one
smartarse at a time, so breeze, pal.
Time for a limerick yet?
There once was a poor puss called Oskar
who slipped his shvantz to a kochka.
The kochka had fangs
and gnawed off his wang,
so now he’s just half a Kokoschka, dah-dum.
Or as Tell Me, Doctor’s Winifred May de Kok always said at the end of the show,
Remember kids, a kok in die hand is die meite werd twee in ’n termiethoop! And what
better advice could you hope for your children in a world such as ours beset by
doubt & insecurity? There are so few role models we can really feel confident
turning to in this day & age, where intemperate immodesty & unbridled lust
tear at the very fabric of our civilisation. But no matter how low you sink, you
can always turn to Winifred May de Kok. Don’t succumb to the scourge of
disillusionment! Pick up the phone & dial now. All major credit cards accepted.
Why feel alone, when you can share your anxieties with likeminded sufferers in
our friendly chatline community? Call now & if you’re not satisfied, we won’t be
satisfied either.
Oh ho! And look, there’s little cockeyed Koko with that pealed
chickenneck poking from his pants — obviously missed out on the inspirational
talk just back there, feeling all alone & insufficient. See what he’s been reduced
to, hanging around the crossroads like a bad smell trying to strike a deal with the
Man. Man gotta be able to sell him somethin’ more substantial down there, if
anyone can. He’d give an arm & a leg, anything! Just so long as he can slip the
747
love of his miserable existence the Real Deal — light up those pinball eyes of
