The Combinations, page 116
Oediballs was lapping like crazy, like he was gonna stuff his whole face in there,
bracing for that extra bit of traction. Which was when those otherwise not
uncomely knees of hers went way back past her ears & on over her head,
upending the applecart, so to speak. And with all the tragic aplomb of a Roger
Corman production, sending her quite literally arse over tit out of the deckchair
right off the edge of the patio, wings flappetyflapping in the updraught, too
stunned to scream or even roll her eyes at the camera as she plunged to her
ungainly doom. It was the stuff of legend & barely had the splatter dried in the
deep crevasse where she lay, than Oedipoon’s electric joystick could be heard
teasing out riffs from such future timeless swansongs as Everyone knows about
Memphis, goddamn! & that instant classic, Don’t Mind Me Ma, I’m Only Flyin’…
There once was a dowdy old Sphinx
who by night was a slutty little minx:
the old folks she’d a-riddle,
while the slowpokes she’d diddle
then fly away with their pricks.
�
Was that really how the story ended? Meh. What Němec wanted to know was,
who was counting? Well of course none of it had a leg to stand on.* And what
* Like that spurious distaff in Oedi’s pants? That sublimated semaphore of a rite of passage? That
sceptical brickbat with which the slipshod son had wrought unwitting vengeance upon his
754
moral had he, Němec of Niemandsland, deprived of the rites of patricide, drawn
from the tail-end of all this? Ol’ Deathbed with wings on? What turgid
midnight eructations, pathetic goblingängers in black&white, etc.? There he
stood, eyeball-to-eyeball with himself, on his own two feet. He bought himself
another drink from the bottle. Maybe if he rubbed it the right way, there was a
genie inside’d pop out for a bit of a natter?
‘G’day mate.’
‘Do I get three wishes?’
‘Eh?’
‘For releasing you from your imprisonment.’
‘Yer off yer pannikin, mate. Only came out for a breath a fresh air.’
‘Got any good jokes?’
‘Y’ve heard the one about the twelve-inch pianist I s’pose?’
‘Yeah, heard that one.’
‘I know a coupla limericks, would that do ya?’
‘Let’s hear ’em then.’
‘Rightio. There once was a…’
G-O-N-G!!!!
We interrupt this programme for the following announcement:
NASA has reported today detecting a distress signal originating in the
vicinity of Alpha Centauri. The signal, described by scientists as resembling a
garbled recording of Marilyn Monroe signing “Happy Birthday Mister
President,” was picked up by lunar satellites at around a.m. Eastern Standard
Time. An official, speaking on condition of anonymity, declined to be drawn on
the question of what the signal might mean, other than to say it was obvious
someone, or some thing, was clearly in considerable distress out there. “Could
this be an alien life form issuing a call for help? We just don’t know.” A
spokesperson for the White House insisted that the President categorically &
unreservedly denied any & all suggestion that the UFO abduction of a White
House intern might’ve been involved. “The President, like all of us, is anxious to
ensure that everything that can be done to fully assess the situation & determine
the correct, timely & most adequate course of action, is being done.” Concerning
dyspeptic dad? The miraculated wand to which he, Oediprick, basking in an idiot’s glory, owed his
malehood while making a mockery of his alibi (the Sphinx of his nightmares returning as the
Jocusta of his wetdreams, that witless wench who should’ve kept her combinations under lock &
key)? Poor Oedipussy, everything pointed to him not belonging in the world at all — hero of
nothing, scavenger for morsels of unmitigated intent. [:]
755
the apparent “message” to the President contained in the transmission, the
spokesman insisted that any reference to the POTUS in alien broadcasts should
be treated “with extreme circumspection” & added “factoring-in the time
element, it is highly unlikely that the current administration is in any way
connected.” Senate Republican leader, Pritchard Albumen, however, lambasted
the President over “once again having failed to stem the tide of illegal aliens into
the United States.” “The only answer,” Senator Albumen told reporters at a
lunchtime press conference, “is to build a really big wall. We’ve got to make
America great again!” Concerned about the government’s handling of the
situation so far, a number of leading scientists have called on the President to do
more to ensure that any call for help from our sister solarsystem is addressed on
humanitarian rather than political grounds. “We could be seeing the first
evidence of intelligent life in the universe that isn’t just evolved bacterial slime
seeking to make direct contact with us here on Earth. Why they’ve waited until
now, or what the nature of the distress is, we can only wait & see. But from a
human perspective, this is a unique opportunity. Who knows? The potential’s
there for us to find out about where we might’ve come from. The origin of Life-
as-we-Know-It.”
When in reality, of course, most men just want to crawl back inside their
mammy’s vaginas in full Technicolor & stay put for the duration.
‘D’you buy all that “Origin of Life” bullshit?’
‘I dunno, man, stuff just kinda happens. I mean, billions of years?’
‘Yeah, I mean when it’s all over, the universe won’t even know we existed.’
‘It’s kind of a waste, but what if it isn’t like that?’
‘God & stuff?’
‘No, I mean, what if we somehow changed some basic parameter. By
accident or something. Or just by being here, doing what we do.’
‘Like the way we fucked up the planet?’
‘Yeah, kinda like that. Like when white people went to Australia & took
all their diseases & just sorta wiped out all the Aborigines.’
‘You mean like a virus or something?’
‘Kinda. Like if somehow we did something to fuck with the basic
structure out there.’
‘Like nuking a blackhole or something.’
‘Kinda.’
‘Gravity waves.’
‘Yeah.’
756
‘Like splitting the Higgs Boson & undoing all the, you know?’
‘Connections & stuff.’
‘Right.’
‘Kinda put everything on a different course.’
‘Like no more Ice Age. Like we basically changed the weather down here,
what if we changed the weather up there?’
‘So like the sun doesn’t blow up in a couple of million years of whatever?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Or we make wormholes or something.’
‘Yeah, something.’
‘That’d be something.’
‘Hey man, what kinda drugs you figure they’ve got out there? Aliens &
stuff. I mean, if you could grow weed on Mars, right, it’d be different, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Different everything.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Different kinda high, maybe.’
‘We oughta send up some seeds or something. In a pod.’
‘Hehe.’
‘Hehe.’
‘Hehe.’
Was that the sound of him laughing to himself? Voices in yer head, kiddo?
Sheet, break the news to me slowly. Němec killed the bottle & tossed that in the
sink with the empty milk carton. Clank. There goes another dead sailor. Or dead
cosmonaut. Dead genie. Lives on his back, hehe. Dies on his back, more like.
Jesus, how much more of this I don’t think I could stand. What ho, Squillhead?
Němec tilted down the hall. The walls tilted with him. Casting a radius of weird
timespace interference. Think one day he’ll twig? Man in his rocket-tower, find
the right plug, flip the switch, broadcast squillbrain-chaos into the ether.
AnarchoT.E.S.L.A.ism. Black Star flibbertigibbet. The KING is indeed a
THING, hehe. Knowing that he too, Němec-of-Neanderthalia, like the brothers
Oedipatsy & Oedispurious before him, was that glitch in the backwards
machinery, universe-in-a-mirror stuff. A self-duplicated nothing! Free to deny
himself with impunity! Why blame the System when you can blame him instead?
The androids in their Control Room, shrinking all those little Earthling heads
down to the correct size. How’d Němec miss out, hehe? Giving the mirrorworld
the middle finger & look where that mighty effort got him. Up & at ’em, Atom
757
Ant! Don’t worry, kiddo, you could’ve bullshitted with the best of ’em. Veritably. And
let no man sayeth antwise.
‘Hey, ghost? You still out there?’
He was sick of Mahler anyway. Sick of poetry. Sick of dead children. He
rifled the record box & came up with something with lots of saxophone in it.
Time to ransack the joint to see where those other bottles went. He got to it
with an almost catatonic scrupulousness. Nope. Not a drop of the clear stuff to
be found. An uncorked bottle of red, though, stuffed behind the recordplayer.
Mmm. Nice round vinegary bouquet. Beggars ain’t choosers, kiddo. He spilled
some down his shirt. Loosened a tooth. They did this to him. He settled down
on the floor for a bit of the old griefstricken wino routine. The sax wailed.
Němec gargled the grapejuice. And it was like that, with a nod to all worldly
regimes of child abductors, that one of the Bugman’s stories came quite suddenly
to mind, about a kid the Bugman’d met, no more than sixteen, back during the
purges, in a transit camp near Děčín. The kid’s father was some kind of poet —
nobody he’d ever heard of, but who’d he ever heard of? Besides, it was enough
for a man to talk to his own shadow for Nosek’s StB goons to keep a file on him.
Creeping around in the dead of night with their spy cameras to photograph
some sadsack poet’s napkin doodlings. Bugs under the bed. Peepholes in the
floor. Someone up the foodchain must’ve actually read the stuff & decided it was
politically unsound — i.e. couldn’t understand a syllable of it — & fired off a
warrant for the poor fucker’s immediate arrest. So about a month in real-time
down the bureaucratic conveyor belt & the doorbell rings in the apartment
where the kid lives with his mum. Hello, visitors in the middle of the night? Kid’s
mum answers the door & there’re these two goons in brown leather coats
standing outside. Tell her they’ve come to arrest her old man, Mr Poet So&so,
for Criminal Subversion of the Republic in Collusion with Foreign Agents.
Mum hears this & has a complete nervous breakdown right there on the spot.
Turns out her old man’s been dead three years already. No skin off their noses,
the goons in coats just arrest the kid instead.
�
Then everything went black. It went black because the executive producers
decided the director ought to insert one of those industry-standard “dream
sequence” deus ex machina things to give the plot a bit more “grounding” than it’s
758
been experiencing lately, like a dose of Zoloft.
‘Jeez, ain’t this wanker gettin’ a tad outa hand?’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll fix it in the edit, cut all the extraneous bullshit.’
‘It’ll end up bein’ like one of them anorexic kids.’
‘That whole concentration camp look’s really chic right now, could be
what saves it.’
‘Could be what makes it great, even.’
‘Well look at the lead guy, he’s like death-on-a-stick already. Where’s the
wiggle room?’
‘My doctor always says, when you hit bone, you know you’re cuttin’ in the
right direction.’
‘Well let me tell you, when Orson Welles made The Sphinx? They ended
up with a thousand miles of outtakes. They were carting the stuff away from the
editing room in articulated lorries. You know how many fuckin’ Teamsters it
takes to haul a thousand miles of outtakes?’
‘That wouldn’t get you from here to my tante Marcia.’
‘Orson Welles was a schmuck.’
‘That shabbas goy? Citizen who?’
‘Good thing we’ve got insurance.’
‘He couldn’t’ve shined your shoes, Pop.’
‘It ain’t the gelt, it’s the rep that matters. Gelt schmelt! But a man ain’t
nothin’ without his rep.’
‘Should we run the last take? I got this feelin’ somethin’s missin’ outa the
dialogue…’
‘I say fuck it! Just whack in the dream stuff & get it over. Who cares about
continuity these days? You’re lucky ten minutes in if they remember which
movie they’re supposed to be watchin’.’
‘I’m with Moe on that one. It’s the end that’s the keeper. They’re still in
their seats after the first ten, the rest’s just like valium to a housewife. All they
want is for you to give ’em something to remember it when it’s all over. Like
flowers or somethin’.’
‘Hey, Louie! Roll that scene again, will ya?’
Then everything went black. A kind of conjectural blackness because
Němec couldn’t in fact see it, but only sense it. It was as if he’d fallen into a
black hole — the hole at the centre of “everything” & that there was no climbing
out of. It’d been one helluva day, whichever way he chose to look at it.
Eventually, of course, all that sort of thing catches up with you — like a couple
759
of gumshoes wearing down a fugitive from justice. This’s it, Jack. You’re
surrounded. There’s no way out. Surrender while you’ve still got the chance. No-one
listening? No-one taking down notes? The moment extended itself. Němec saw
himself standing outside it, observing it, as though watching over a sleeping
body he’d be punished if he disturbed. Not much of a body. More like a
pasticcioed doll jumbled together from broken fragments.
‘God, you could see that one coming a mile off…’
‘Reckon that’s bad, wait till you see what’s next.’
When Němec snapped-to it really was dark. But even in this unexpected
darkness, representing who-knew-how-many lost hours, he had the vivid
recollection of a dream — a dream he had no memory of actually having dreamt.
In it, he was sitting exactly as he really was sitting, in a darkened room, watching
images projected on a flickering screen. This alerted him to the fact that the
dream in question was going to be one of those “cinema-type” dreams (Cartesian
homunculus up in the projection room & all that). And yet, at the same time, he
knew that the dream he was in the process of “remembering” wasn’t the actual
dream, but something else, a kind of container — one inside the other. In the
dream which his dreamself was having inside his dream, Němec was surprised to
see Alice Steinerová’s twin brother doing a Jean-Paul Belmondo filterless Gitane
routine over a Pernod on the terrace at the Café Grand Cul — most notorious
swish joint in town — with its gypsy waiters & croissants baked from plaster-of-
Paris, the only genuine Froggy thing about it.
‘Well gee, Pierre, d’you really think my arse looks big in this?’
If Němec isn’t mistaken, our man’s wearing his stovepipes at least five
sizes too small, trying to give everyone the impression he’s got a queue the size of
that fake Eiffel Tower on the hill, but for those in the know it’s more like the
short end of a soggy brioche with a couple of sour grapes tucked in gratis. There
he goes, cruising the tables with that broomstick-up-the-arse like he’s some
fucking hipster Napoleon, or maybe it’s a dead carp, sure as shit something’s on
the nose.
And what the hell ever did become of that child-prodigy in the Prof’s
story, that real family uplift saga, about the Wonderkid with the Donkey’s
Dingaling? Could that’ve been him reincarnate like the Dalai Lama a few
chapters back, there in the play? Boy Genius Sammy with, gosh! a secret chess
submarine working away under the table blip-blipping coded messages to
Control, countermoves wired back in crotch-tingling Morse: Better strangle that
SOB’s Queenside rook PDQ, Kid, things is gonna get hot! Carrying the baton, so to
760
speak, down the ages. Some ingrown Moby Dick character one day, the Pope’s
nose the next, passing himself off as: . a midget in the company of giants; . a
circus freak among real men; . a trouser-snake in Maria Teresa’s private zoo; .
