The Combinations, page 119
leftovers on his midnight breakfast plate. Rind of the ancient marmalade.
Breadcrumbs & rancid butter. Lives like a bloody king, that codger in the fancy
skullcap. Munchmunchmunch. Yum-o! And how about a slice of that parboiled
shite on the Petri dish. Very fancy, very gourmet, what? Zimzamzooom! Laying
down some très subtle vapour trails there, faking a bit of that pseudorandom
aimlessness to fox the opposition. Loop-de-loop. Figure-eight. Double-pike.
Then voom hitting the g-forces el serioso, straight up at the ceiling there like
playing chicken with a ten tonne Mack. Whoa! Doesn’t even blink! Pulls a
vertical stall, tucking under for a flawlessly executed upsidedown landing on the
mildewed masonry. Ten-outa-fuckin’-ten! Fly-eye view of the ongoing
proceedings below. Ah- ha. Some real multicellular weirdness happening down
there. Zip! Oh-oh, looks like company. Nnnrrrrrttttt!
‘Nazdar, vole!’
‘Eat shit ’n’ die, vole!’
‘Not s’long as aye ken fly, vole! Hahaha.’
‘Hahafuckin’ha.’
‘Hahafuckyoutoo, Magoo. Wot be noo?’
‘Yo, vole, check out dat gross-as-fuck ecto-thingy down dere! Is dat cool or
is dat cool? Want we go grab a bite o’ it?’
‘Holyfriggin’Moses, bro! Dat ain’t no ecto-thingy, dat’s da Devil in dis-
guise!’
‘Why’s da Devil lookin’ like a wo-man, for, vole?’
‘ Dat a woman?’
‘He got all dem wo-man bits.’
‘If dat a woman, she be da ugliest doggone bitch aye ever seen. Looks
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more like da Texass Chitlins Massacre widdout da special defects!’
‘Special wot? Dey had who?’
‘Dem great big hunks o’ white meat, vole! Ugly as Jesus’ mama!’
‘Well, least dey ain’t singin’, ya know, like in Da Soun’ o’ Musak.’
‘Yo, bro. Edelweiss, ba-ba-damn! Whitey poon taste nice, ba-ba-damn!’
‘Woah! Is dat wot aye tink it is?’
‘Dunno, bro, whadya tink it is?’
‘Looks like da old skullcap’s havin’ dat lily ass o’ his flay - ed wid da nastiest
bundle o’ birch faggots dis here buzzbomb ever did klep eyes upone…’
Swiiiiish! Whack!
Well, after he bartered his soul, his charisma, his baubles & his last
mental faculty, what’d that idiot semblable have left to peddle but his polymathic
posterior, in a manner of speaking, to try to buy just a little more time? And
morphing Mephistopheles, done up now like postcoital Frankensteinian parody
of the poor bugger’s belovèd stepdaughter, wanton Westonia no less, the
raunchiest rhymester Golem City’s seen since, since, well for a very long while
indeed. Arousing in the way a final sickness might be arousing to a dying man.
She’s really bending her elbow, giving it to dear old dads like there’s a fire needs
fanning down below, hehe. Labcoat & shirttails up around his waist, forked
beard a-flutter, sweat beading his brow. And this’s just the warm-up, lovelies.
You can see it in the whites of his eyes, he’s degradation’s slave. Like a
whorehouse piano player with a gutful of Franz Liszt stuck in his craw &
nothing but saloon slop coming out. He could’ve been someone, he could’ve
amounted to something, he could’ve been a better class of sucker than this. The
Elixir’s right there, in his mind he can see IT, very nearly almost within his
grasp. But he’ll go to Hell first before that flagellating flibbertygibbet’ll get IT
out’ve HIM! That’s right. This Westonia shtick’s a stick too far! There were
limits, you know, things even a crapulous old queer like K here wouldn’t
countenance on his mother’s grave. Really. You just don’t underestimate a man
who’s laid down sideways all his life. He’ll take his secret with him, by Christ, if
it’s the last thing he does. Burn his books. Break his beakers. Bury IT under a
mountain of gibberish. Then if he still has his own legs, & even if he hasn’t, he’ll
make a run for it, vamoose, be air. Make it look good, like some Stalag 17
suicide run. See if that mercurial maggot figures out he’s been stiffed real good!
Hissssssssss! Thwack!
‘Owwwww!!!!!!’
‘Quiet in there!’
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Borislav gave the door to the alchemist’s cell a mighty backhand. Silence
within. He cracked his enormous knuckles, dropped his hand onto the region of
his jockstrap & idly scratched a sliver of scrotum poking through the seam.
‘Weirdo,’ Vratislav grunted. ‘The hell’s he doin’ in there anyway?’
‘The place adjectivally stinks,’ Rostislav slapped a playing card face-up on
the stool that stood between the three of them. ‘Wot we gotta end up with sub-
par employment like this for, s’wot I wanna know. Twenty years loyal service ’n’
we gotta babysit some potzo with a chemistry set.’
Borislav slapped a card down on top of the one Rostislav had just slapped
down. Vratislav slapped another on top of that. It was Rostislav’s go again.
‘I’d rather be in adjectival Bulgaria,’ he said, scratching a chin the size of a
garbage pale. ‘Beatin’ the innards out of adjectival Turks.’
He slapped down a card. Borislav farted, slapped down a card.
‘Snap!’ Vratislav hoiked.
He grabbed the cards in his spade hands & shuffled them into his deck.
Slapped a card on the stool.
‘I’d fancy a couple of months in Italy meself,’ Rostislav said, slapping
down a card. ‘You know, see some of the old buildin’s & stuff. Visit the
museums.’
‘Me mum spent her holidays in Verona last year,’ said Borislav. ‘Said you
wouldn’t believe the mozzies. Had an awful time.’
‘Autumn’s your best bet, s’wot I’ve been told.’
‘Don’t like all them foreign places much meself. I’d rather beat the innards
out of Turks right ’ere.’
‘Well they’ve got their own adjectival country, don’t they? Wot, they got
sick of all that sand & flies & stuff & had to come over ’ere & nick ours?’
‘Wot I heard is, the guards over on the south wing are votin’ to go out on
strike over it. Apparently there’s adjectival Turks bein’ given all the plum jobs
shovellin’ out the latrines.’
‘That’s just typical, init?’
‘Snap!’ growled Borislav.
‘Excuse I,’ Vratislav groaned, heaving his enormous leathery posterior off
his stool & giving his jerkin a shrug. ‘Gotta splash the sandals.’
Flip flap flop as he slouched off down the flagstones, first on the right,
watch the step, shut the door behind, unhook the old codpiece for a well-
deserved slash. Point Percy at the porcelain, figuratively speaking. Shake hands
with the wife’s best friend, in a manner of. Siphon the python, to be exact. A
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healthy stream of recycled swill, frothing out of the hole in the floor bubble
bubble bubble & a yellowybrown sludge welling up, spilling all over the hunched-
up giant’s exposed toe-line, slopping about his size insoles. Ergh! No room to
escape the flood in there. Bloody Habsburg plumbing! Gurgle gurgle belch. Now
he’ll have to schlep around with soggy feet for the rest of the night, stinking of
piss & God only knew what else, the stuff people poured down the jacks these
days, no consideration for the environment or anything. Then splarf! & the
whole lot suddenly got sucked down in a gush of unblockage, having reached
some kind of critical volume-to-mass ratio, slurping southbound through the
shitshoot & off into space like one of them vacuum-sealed midAtlantic flush-
jobs at high altitude, atomised on impact with the stratosphere or whatever they
were bound to call it, come the day. Funny the sorts of things start ticking
around your head during &/or after a gratifying bladder-release. Future air-
travel, now wouldn’t that be a gag, eh? Couldn’t you just picture the lads, knees
up round their ears in the backrow of economy class for a dirty weekend in
Istanbul! Priceless! Just wait till they heard that one! Christ, he’d try flappin’ his
own wings off the watchtower wall if it’d get him away from this dump.
Weeweeweeeeeeeeeee goes the pee down into the sea…
Well, it wasn’t the sea exactly, but a moat’s not the worst place for a
particle of piss to wind up in the general scheme of things, lots of opportunities,
adventure, new faces, fishy tadpole whatsits to investigate, water bears, mud
monsters, bouquets of bluegreen algae, really pretty that time of year. Even the
odd floating skullcap belonging no doubt to another one of them haphazard
alchemist types with compound fractures out his de-lobed ears, just dropped-in
for a quick visit, a quick peekaroo at the scenery, & oh how very scenic it indeed
is down here in the middle of the night, little crescent moons reflecting in gently
undulating concentric wavelets. Splish splash splosh! And…
‘The dirty bugger! He’s GOOOOOONE!’
Echoing out the high tower window, a mellifluous windborne lament
that, for the poor bastards stationed outside the cell door, was more like a
spleen-rupturing howl. Rostislav, Borislav & Vratislav peered in through the
doorway while the charwoman, gone arse-over-tit in a puddle of quicksilver,
brush, pail & all, sat there on the floor wailing her head off & bugeyed pointing
at the bloodsmear HELTER SKELTER graffitied across the walls. Bits of
shredded birch strewn about, shattered glass, books hacked from their covers,
machines crudely dismembered, a labcoat with a K monogrammed on the
breast pocket draped over a chairback, bloodied ropes lying near about, but no
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sign of the old crackpot. Jumped he must’ve!
And perched there unbeknownst on the windowsill, a bloody big black
Crow giving the howling charwoman the beady eye. Then some quick damage
assessment, head cocked to one side. Yep, just as Crow thought: that
Mephrastus-in-Drag couldn’t find a hole in a whorehouse, even if it was parked
under his nose, which in this case it proverbially was. K’s magic manuscript,
camouflaged right into the open air. The solus scriptura of the book that
brooked no equal, whose key was the Kama Sutra of the mouth & tongue that
must be grown for it to speak — kroark! kroark! — a little lubrication of the
linguistic cortex, back brain, frontal lobe, lower abdominal, etc… Saying, ’ERE I
AM to anyone who wasn’t a deafblind halfwit, present company excluded of
course. How pathetic it looked, heaped beside the dead alchemist’s stool in that
miserable closet, like mouldy foodscraps or the shaggy arse of a wistful-looking
mutt about to crap in the middle of your doorstep — a prize turd to be boiled
down into haemorrhoid balm for some Mephritic monkey with a pompom on
the end of its tail, able to perform all nature of tricks, if only it could be trained
to shit gold. A four-legged golem. Bowwow! And if that, what else couldn’t it be
taught to do? Lay a parboiled egg? The philosopher’s stone itself? But not this
time, Mephistyrselfinthearse! Kroark!
The charwoman howled some more. The three giants crowded in the
doorway. Crow cackled quietly to himself, flapped unseen onto the floor, got his
black beak around said book (looked just like a goddamn paving stone &
weighed like one too) & without further ado beat a hasty retreat. Flap flap flap
out over the moat & across the fields, down onto the awaiting shoulder of a
sinister cloaked figure astride a mighty black steed. Said figure’s eyes flash in the
moonlight. Nothing that has transpired up there in the castle tower has escaped
his piercing gaze. For he has seen all, knows all. That’s right, kids, just as you
expected, it’s our old friend, der schwartze Reiter.
‘Good work, Crow,’ taking the book in gauntleted hand & giving the bird
an appreciative chuck under the craw. ‘That pretty much concludes our business
here for today. Let’s hit the highroad before someone figures it out…’
And with the Lone Ranger theme tune wafting faintly in his wake, the
Black Rider rides right off the page into the Land of As If, through swirling
mind-mandalas & archetypes & synchronicities & dream keys. Němec blinked
at the words spiralling weirdly about like that on the paper right there in front of
him. Zapf! Here we go again! Then realised it wasn’t the words moving but
something else, something black spinning on its end & rolling to a stop. Must’ve
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fallen from somewhere. He leant down to pick it up. Well I’ll be. It was one of
the Prof’s chesspieces. A knight, no less. Maybe even the knight, but where’d it
come from? Němec glanced at the ceiling. Nothing much up there except
cracked plaster turned grey over the years, prolapsed mouldings, cobwebs in the
corners, mottled by watermarks & sloping at a wrong angle. He turned the
chesspiece between his fingers. Yer wastin’ yer time, kiddo, been here before,
remember? The arbitrary beginning & thereafter the mania of causation, like
some sort of Gomer Piles character with an idée fixe to diddle Pandora’s
powderbox, only to wind up in the boobyhatch without ever seeing the funny
side of his predicament, hehe, ramping up the pathos in hope, perhaps, however
unrealistic, of fitting a twist into it, something that’d upset the readers’
arrangements & leave them wondering at how mysteriously the Hand of the
Author moves, catching them five minutes from the end of the episode just
when they coulda swore they had it all figured out, coulda written the damn
thing themselves even, a whole dressed-up masterpiece-by-numbers, blah-de-
blah-blah-blah, just like some monkey-in-disguise at the junior spelling bee, who
wins the electric typewriter & never looks back…
Thump! went something upstairs. Eh? A fine white powdery dust sifted
down onto Němec’s face. He sputtered, waved his hands. The ceiling shook.
Clop clop clop. And was that the sound of the Prof’s ghost he could hear, laughing
in the distance?
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55
___________
THE KEY
Leucippus of Miletus, a contemporary of Democritus, believed that
nothing happens without a cause, but everything with a cause & by
necessity. He also believed everything was composed of atoms, like motes
in a sunbeam, circulating in an infinite void. The entire universe might
just as well’ve been nothing but the morbid symptom of a mind driven to
despair by the minute significance of all things: in every direction, lines of
influence spread out & closed-in on themselves — dreams & possible
worlds — untranslatable idioms of the evolutionary cosmos. It was for
others to believe that Creation had a purpose or suffer the doubt that their
God merely signified the purpose of a yet higher rationale — the clockwork
homunculus inside the Mind of the Cosmos: somewhere, a hidden chess
player calculating the moves, like the dwarf concealed inside Kempelen’s
machine, the brain inside the automaton, God’s puppetmaster. As if
behind every bit of randomness there stood a concocted Sphinx, whose
riddle was a mirror held up to Reason, ready to evaporate the moment you
construed it.*
— T. Hájek, Geschichte als göttliche Wahrscheinlichkeit
A tiny gold figure was spinning & turning end over end, suspended in the
darkness, revolving in its own firmament. It was terribly cold. Němec was lying
on his back, naked, in the snow. Above him, the sky was black, the snow had
ceased to fall, there was only that gold thing, glittering, turning, hanging there.
He couldn’t see what it was. At first he thought it was an astrologer’s sphere,
then a gold coin, a ring, a blade. Their shapes formed & reformed, blurring like
images in water. Then he saw what it was — a key. Turning end over end, its
movement described a circle of light against the blackness. It revolved, without
ever coming closer.
* What was it the schoolmasters said? “In logic, nothing’s accidental: the riddle doesn’t exist — if a
question can be put at all, it can also be answered…” Ludwig Wittgenstein, son of a Zhiddish steel
magnate, Tractarsus Logico-Phallusophicus .. [:]
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When the mood took her, Mrs Severínová was liable to fall into lengthy
reminiscence — about the golden years, the pervading spirit, the heyday of the
blood — but the mood very rarely did. This occasion, though, was one of them.
‘It was on account of the mechanical dolls,’ she said, inviting him to a cup
of Yunan tea from the obligatory pot on the kitchen table. A bundle of the old
