The Combinations, page 126
sodden ink-running mess a modicum of dignity — putting the corpus mysticum
back together with its right parts reconnected in the right order, as if capable of
speaking the magic words over it & bringing it back to life. Except the thoughts
& words in Němec’s head seemed more like the spastic babbling of a toad-
headed beetle-bat twitching at the end of a Galvani shock machine.
* Heavy stuff. [:]
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Just when things looked like they might be getting interesting, the
workmen appeared. Eight of them, in muddy boots & blue quilted overalls, wool
hats pulled down over their eyes, dragging in toolboxes, ladders, dropsheets,
paint buckets, sacks of plaster-of-Paris, etc. Like undertakers’ mutes, not so
much as a grunt by way of an ’ere we are, mate, this gaff is ’ereby requisitioned.
They set up right there in the Prof’s bureau. It was impossible for Němec to
gauge the extent of his hallucination. The mummers stacked their gear &
straightaway filed out again. Quite a crowd. Němec followed them to the door,
listened to the steps receding down the stairwell. Feelin’ like there’s more than
usual goin’ on that you don’t quite understand, eh, kiddo? And what if he wasn’t
hallucinating? Thought they were gonna cure you of that, did ya? Maybe all them
drugs was just to get all the mess in your head rearranged into the RIGHT mess —
some keycoded primordial secrethandshake mess, sensitive to whatever spooky influence
they’re zapping at you down through the ether. Or maybe you figured it out already
back at the beginning. Androids. Reckon it’s the androids, kiddo?
The circle closed, so to speak, & in closing, opened.
Němec locked the door. But what good would that do?
Back in the Prof’s sanctum sanctorum the dwarf had gone. Němec stared
helplessly at the room — & for a long time it seemed as if it was staring back at
him, from above & from all sides, like an observer observing an insect in a box.
For good measure he searched the apartment, but the dwarf was nowhere to be
found. Got out while the going was good, eh? And that meant things were only
going to get worse? What would the Bugman have said in a situation like this?
You’re on your own, kiddo. But whatever you do, don’t shit yourself, it only makes
more of a mess you’ll have to clean up afterwards. He felt he was back exactly where
he’d started. And then he stopped cold.
In his trouser pocket, Němec felt his right hand close around something
hard & metallic. A shiver ran up his arm & he began to feel sick all over again.
He clenched his fist tight, the object bit into his flesh. Cogs turned in the back
of his mind. Staggering out to the stairs, he found no sign of the dwarf there
either. Spooky. A couple of workmen pushed past shouldering a sawhorse. As
soon as the coast was clear, Němec leant against the wall & withdrew his hand
from his pocket. There, pressed into his palm, was a brass key. He stared at it
incredulously. Then it came back to him, where it’d come from, & what it was
for. He almost felt saved.
But something told him this wasn’t the key Faktor’s dwarf had been
looking for. Not the key. But it was enough. Echoes, hazy pictures of a room-
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within-a-room, ropes & ladders & underground labyrinths. He groped along the
hallways till he found it — the closet with the back stripped-out, panels hinged
into a door, the musty sanctuary beyond — just as he’d dreamed it. Only he
hadn’t dreamed it. It was real.* He could hear the workmen in the courtyard,
stomping in the snow. His mind resolved itself into action, of its own accord it
seemed — rushing back to the Prof’s bureau, still strewn with paper wreckage,
forming weird constellations on the parquet (even now, Němec felt provoked by
the want of some underlying order, like Severínová reading her tea leaves). He
took a bin-bag from the kitchen & stuffed all the pages he could find in it,
dragged it back to the “secret” room & kicked it under the camp bed — then
back to the bureau to gather whatever else he might need: turntable, box of
vinyls, duffelbag, medicaments, last bottle of moonshine, coffee pot & other
miscellaneous — & with all this, barricaded himself in behind the closet door
like a fugitive. From now on, he thought — but from now on what?
The hole truth & nothing butt…
All Němec wanted was to sleep, but they wouldn’t let him. Out in the hall, the
dull thud of the workmen returning, moving about in the apartment. A slow
southern drawl & twangy guitar drifted in from a portable radio they’d set down
right on his doorstep, so to speak, as if to tell him they knew exactly where he
was at. Over the country&western, the sound of things breaking, being torn up,
getting hammered into rubble. Billy Ray Cyrus meets Einstürzende Neubauten.
Yep. Whatever they were looking for, they hadn’t found it yet. Unless they
weren’t looking. Unless they were just biding their time, waiting for him to lead
them to it. Sure, like a rat leading himself down a hail by the tail. Something
was missing. Something was always missing. Oh well. Truth’s never whole, is
what the Bugman would’ve said. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe Němec had that
all wrong, too.
Němec lay down on the narrow bed in the pitch blackness, listening to the
noise, too tired to think & too tired to sleep. The air in the room inside the
closet felt heavy, as if an electrical storm was brewing somewhere. If he closed
his eyes, would he take on the dreams of those who’d slept there before him?
And who was Josef Kulička? What was the key? The air grew heavier, saturated
with Němec’s own exhaustion, a smell like tobacco mouldering in a tin, cut with
* Really real. [:]
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iodine — a smell like fear or punishment. How d’you escape from a room with no
window and a ladder that only goes up? An attic with no doors? One dead end with a
view onto another? Into his thoughts drifted an image of Edwode Kelley in his
Tower — lightning conductor wanding at the sky — storm-blackened
cumulonimbus — the sudden terrible crack of its discharge burning a cinder in
the eye — the darkness again — the afterflash, breathing deep the pure air —
the nitrus pabulum…
A Besieged Man must want other means. A last redoubt before the
desperate leap into the void — a mirror to climb through — a tunnel carved
from air — or a cyanide capsule — or even just a closet door: between himself &
a bullet between third & fourth vertebrae / a hangman’s noose / a gutful of
zyklon-B / lbs of guillotine blade swishing down from ft in some ex-
Gestapo HQ basement / a dissection slab under a hanging lightbulb, scalpels
arranged in kidney dishes, voltameter & electrodes & alligator clips. The paschal
lamb. All that. But if his hours listening to Volta mumble into his cigar had
taught Němec anything: the waiting game in the eternal waiting room dreaming
of the Great Maze outside, where a man might foster the absurd notion that he’s
not in reality a species of rat watched by secret laughing eyes. A flick of the
switch & see him scamper! Up the ladder, like a wisp from a chimney stack.
Well goodbye to that morose quack clinging to his mahogany desk like it was
the Raft of the Medusa.
And what forces were at work contesting his fate, eh? Not that there was
much to contest? It’d be enough to just kick his teeth in. He touched his mouth:
it stung. A little bit of pain, that was all. Memory? Something underground. A
wall. Voices? He searched about for handles, but found none. A stumble in the
dark, digging an escape route. A ladder without rungs. Up there, maybe? The
moment of truth? Once more the bold leap into the void, eh, kiddo? One more desperate
howling laugh into the dark? Or go down, like Orpheus? See with your own eyes…
What disjointed subset of the world was it his to prove or disprove? Working
against the mindclock, forms of slowness building new impediments, neither
asleep nor not asleep, to get somewhere before the universe of thinkable objects
came apart entirely, no longer held by improbable threads, & the body with it,
finally! But why should anywhere else be better than where he already was? And
all this, not without precedent, eh? Twice fallen, so to speak. Not unforeseeable
if still unforeseen? Not satisfied with the nature of appearances? Of
disappearances? Of inappearances?
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How, after the Prof died, catching himself at times unawares, at others
being caught, as if by some indefinable presence, or a definable absence. What
Volta had said, that to achieve purity, Man must be cleansed even of his soul. And
what was that supposed to mean? He’d tried to isolate the various reasons for his
being there, not the specific there of the room, but the general there of his socalled existence. As if he’d been looking all along for his own reflection. But each time
the world threw up obstacles, dead ends. It was an old story.
Concerning the “Fall”
Well all that was about as enlightening in his present situation as the physics of
tossing a book out a fourth floor window. Time, space & a free-falling projectile.
The kind of thing any twit with half a brain could do backwards with their eyes
closed. Němec turned the image around in his mind, like a child’s puzzle,
present but with no depth. Sure, easy as stepping into a big black hole.
It was the first thing Němec saw when he turned the light back on. How he’d
missed seeing it the first time, he didn’t know.* An attaché case sitting beside
the desk — brown, tan almost — identical to the ones in the basement of the
Patriot Klub: two side pockets with gold sliding clasps, key holes, a hinged
leather handle. What it contained, though. Well, had Němec not been
convinced he was awake, he’d’ve sworn it was a dream, a dream he’d already had,
twice before, with his eyes open. Only this time there was no square of white
card with NEMOC typed on it,* just a plain package & inside the package a kind of
book. Like its counterpart, it was wrapped in a kind of undistinguished beige,
only this one hadn’t come out of a Xerox machine. Vellum, presumably. A very
expensive kind of undistinguished. It was creased at the edges & heavily seamed.
* But we do, don’t we, eh, Squillhead? [:]
* Third time lucky, maybe? As they say, a bit of variation, good as a holiday! [:]
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Old, to be precise. Was there any other kind of velum? Automatically he turned
to the first page, always eager to get on with the story. There was that weird
brown calligraphy again, alright, bled-though with some sort of cartoon plant,
etc. But facing, instead of an ex libris card with the Yale crest, & Beinecke Rare
Book & Manuscript Library reference number MS pencilled on it, was a
Reich’s eagle with swastika & v runes. Not, insofar as Němec had been
expecting anything, the kind of thing he would’ve expected.
‘Holy Moses!’ he said aloud, startling himself in the process.
Had anyone heard? The question immediately struck him as ridiculous.
Who did he thing would’ve heard? The ninjas or whatever they were, time-
travelling Nazis from the next dimension who’d just dropped by with an attaché
case on their way to God only knew where, were any such God to’ve existed.
Out in the hallway the radio continued to twang, the walls to shake. The door
remained barricaded, just as it had been. Spooky. Maybe that secret room was in
fact a kind of portal & somewhere, in a different time from this, someone in
perhaps an even less envious position than him was frantically searching for an
attaché case that’d apparently just vanished into thin air.
Mmm. So there were two, then. Two Voynich Manuscripts, in two
parallel dimensions. Zap! Or did it mean, now that this VM had popped up out
of nowhere, that the other VM had also, simultaneously, gone the other way?
Dropped out of the sky, possibly, on some unsuspecting Nazi’s head? Maybe it
was something like that, had conked Saul off his horse? Well, well, & why not?
What if all the aberrant switcheroos of historical fortune could be traced back (or
forward) to some sort of Voynichian quantum voodoo? Manuscripts from the
sky! Under the bed! Atop the mountain! Making a lightning detour via JFK’s
motorcade, the pyramids of Egypt, Machu Pichu, Salt Lake City.*
After a while spent absorbing the fact of what he was (both figuratively &
literally, potentially & actually) holding in his hands, a strange idea came to him.
What if there’d always two. Two Voynich Manuscripts, not two languages: the
secret of the code ˆ = a “tongue” doubly foreign because divided, i.e. each as
incomplete as the divided hermaphroditic soul Volta waffled on about, ever
seeking its inverted twin, its double, its mirror-image, its doppelgänger… Was
this why it’d remained indecipherable all this time? The key was its incomplete
self? Why stop at two? Perhaps there were others, copies originating in scribal
cloisters in the last Dark Ages, secretly disseminated during the purges of the
* As usual Němec’s thoughts were getting carried away with themselves. [:]
828
Reformation, or faked by enterprising clerics in their bitter struggle against the
Rosicrucians, all up for grabs by the time Fascism was on the rise, every book for
itself, so to speak, some consigned to the flames, others buried, drowned, sealed
in tombs, pulped, rat-eaten, or dandied-up as true relics of the Long Lost
Etcetera, mute fetishes to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, feeding the
market in arcane Nazis mythomania?
Then a timely image flashed through Němec’s head, of the pile of
discarded attaché cases in the wine cellar under Jilská Street. Now it’s all
beginning to make sense, mmm? What if for each attaché case there existed also a
unique Manuscript? He envisaged himself, all of a sudden, in a room ten years
hence, shelves on all sides piled high, all the way to the ceiling, with countless
Voynich Manuscripts, as if it’d become his sole task in life to be guardian of
them all, receiving them into this hidden repository, delivered by unknown
hands, the secret couriers of an occult bibliomania, some hidden store in process
of being distributed, for reasons undisclosed, between rooms such as this one, in
this or other cities like it — who knew how many, or which other unwitting
librarians existed out there!
And what about Faktor? Was he searching for the same thing, or some
other, unrelated, yet coincident thing? Or was it the One True he sought?
Perhaps these were meant to be clues, pointers, like attracting like? Which made
him what? The mediumistic idiot, book under his pillow, mumbling its secret
dictation in the dark? Or, strange thought, did it go much deeper than that?
Beyond duplicates, twin, Nazi forgeries, to the revelation that there was no
original? The book, or books, nothing but an allegory of THE BOOK?
Or not so metaphysical, something simpler, more obvious, like the
Voynich Manuscript being really just a worthless copy, riddled with errors, of a
copy of a copy, each in turn & so on & so forth, making the whole thing
illegible in any language. In which case, this? The potential grail of
Voynichologists? The real deal, after all these years, having never left Golem
City in the first place? And somehow, since K’s sojourn in the Tower possibly,
having made its way here? Thence, during the Protektorat? But why the stamp?
Who knew about it? Had the Prof known? Had he too been searching for it —
the key? And what now?
As if to convince himself one way or the other of what lay before him,
Němec spread the folios out in a fanning pattern on the bed. There were at least
a couple of hundred. The familiar procession of dull pigments describing strange
tendrilled organisms & stranger cosmodemonologies. None of your usual
829
upsidedown pentangle rubbish. Not your standard Merlin-the-Magician
grimoire. Had he never heard of Bacon’s pigskin, K’s blarneybook, D’s Dunciad,
Rudi’s folly, Voynich’s V-weapon, Prof Hájek’s hijacked hocusbook, he might’ve
taken it for a child’s antique doodlebook, or some artless schizophrenic’s message
from the Ancients of Mumu. Someone, after all, had made the Manuscript. Just
as someone had made the Gospels & had made God & His mirrorverse, from
