The Combinations, page 127
the Big Boo to the crystal ball, infinitely doubled, disjoined, coincident.
Adventures of the Teleophone
The workmen were still there at : p.m. Front door off its hinges, leaning
against the jambs. Radio in the hallway, the same plaintive drawl going on & on
about trucks & roads & being left by a woman, just sometimes the voices
changed. Down in the courtyard a light shone in the window of the caretaker’s
flat. Everything seemed like this was how it was meant to be, everything in its
proper order, nothing untoward. All the Boolean algebras of AND/OR running
to programme, in which case… Like a lopsided connotation, listening at the
back of a closet for clues: the world as a rat hears it — dwellers of thresholds,
wormholed interstices of the physical & material, the articulated gap in the
rubik’s cube that makes a different arrangement of the same thing — like rooms
in a house, ta-dee-dum…
When the phone rang, Němec waited to see if anything would happen.
Nothing did. The ringing stopped & then began again. He inched out of the
closet into an empty hallway. For a moment, barely recognising where he was,
he stood there like a goat tethered to a pole, expecting some calamity. At the
end of the hall a scene of meticulous disorder presented itself — what it most
resembled was a film being played backwards, a colour documentary projected
on a cut-away screen that showed men wearing blue boiler suits in the process of
deconstructing an apartment. The ringing stopped & began again almost
immediately. Persistent, whoever it was. He picked the phone up off the floor &
lifted the receiver to his ear. At the end of the hall, the workers continued
ripping up the plumbing, dismantling the stove, tearing out the gas pipes,
smashing through walls with sledgehammers, drilling, chiselling, stripping back
the plaster, levering up the parquet, de-glazing the windows. A bitterly cold
draught circulated through the rooms, up the stairwell, rattling the panes.
Even with the banging & stomping, the radio & the static interference,
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the voice at the other end was clearly recognisable.* Němec’s first reflex should’ve
been to hang up before it was too late. Instead he stood there like a chump,
shivering in the draught. He ogled the construction workers in their boiler suits
with a certain degree of apprehension but they very conspicuously paid not the
slightest heed to him. He got the message. Whichever faction they worked for,
the order had come down: treat the jerk on the hat like a ghost, he ain’t even in
the picture. Němec felt a sudden urge to throw the telephone at them, but just
thinking it brought out a cold sweat down the back of his neck. He wiped it
away with his hand but that only made it worse. Then out of the static &
feedback came the Voice. It said his name. Without thinking, Němec asked
what it wanted.
‘Mister Faktor’s been expecting you,’ the dwarf said. ‘He’ll be waiting in
the herbarium, at the Botanical Gardens, midday tomorrow. Punctuality,’ the
word came out simperingly despite all the racket, ‘is advised.’
Shit, what was the guy, telepathic? Got wind already of the second
coming?* Němec tried not to scream. They’ve got ESP in the back of your fucking
head! The idea was so stupid it stopped him in his tracks, so to speak. Then the
line went dead. Němec stared at the receiver as if expecting something else to
happen & then after a minute or so put it down. No sooner done than one of the
workers appeared (they all looked alike, faceless in boiler suits) &, without
saying a word, took the black Buddha from Němec’s hands, unplugged it from
the wall, wound the cable around it as though performing the last rites, &
carried it off. Immediately one of his confreres began stripping the wiring from
the skirting board. Plasterwork sprayed on the floor. Němec retreated once more
* Highpitched, echoing in delay between automated clicks, crossed-line dial tones, remote voices in
the sky, under the ground, relayed from switchboard to switchboard across the continental grid,
satellite link-up, ionosphere, looped into backchannels only to arrive at its intended destination
perhaps long after the event, when the machinery itself, the entire technology of the earth-bound
telephone, was obsolete, post-evolved, no longer a matter even of voice or its analogues but
something more elemental, particulate, mind-to-mind, short-circuit in the ether, spooky influences
in the Mega Cortex, cosmic synapse bother, aberrations in the very fabric of the universe that’d
allow one person to be in ten different places at once, simultaneously, & in each of them equally
aware, cognisant, pursuing intentions through to their concluded implications, etc — & from ten to how many more bifurcations, trifurcations, branching out, going deeper into possibilities
unfathomed, unexplored & most likely unrealisable, though you’d never be quite sure on that
count, never quite certain of what the final outcome would be if ever there was an outcome —
something in perpetual delay, just over the horizon, & the horizon beyond the horizon, beyond
any & all enumeration, calculus, contrivance…? [:]
* So to speak. [:]
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to his sanctuary, expecting some kind of last stand, determined not to give up
that final piece of territory before his work was done, whatever it was…
So, he was expected, was he? It only seemed reasonable, under the
circumstances. What point could there be from now on in trying to resist? He
waited for the Bugman to make one of his customary wisecracks from the
backbrain peanut gallery, but all was depressingly quiet on that front. Well,
worst case, Faktor’s summons would turn out to be just another tease, right?
More of that Jesuitical spuriosity. Or maybe not. Maybe that wasn’t the worst.
Maybe they’d gotten as tired of him as he was & planned to give it to him in the
neck, bury the corpse under the cactus gardens, or the worm farm, or the
goddamn parrot house. Walk right into it. Well…
He leant his weight against the door, it wasn’t much to keep them out if
they decided to make a move on him right there & then, cut all that foreplay
bullshit. Would he do as Faktor said? Did he really have a choice in the matter,
one way or the other? If not now, some other time. If not here, etc. It was like
the moment in one of those films when the sucker thinks about the Girl &, no
doubt in his mind at all that he’s doomed down to his shoelaces, can’t help
wanting to see that lovely treacherous face of hers One Last Time. Even if it’s
her who’s going to pull the trigger. But in his mind, still grasping at some
picture of a frail naked thing all pliant & fleshlike beneath his touch. A victim,
like him, caught up in all the sound & fury of blah-de-blah. Sure she really loves
you, kiddo, didn’t she say so herself in that scene went to turned to crosseyed mush?
You could bet your bottom dollar, that was exactly the sort of nonsensical
nonsense doing the rounds of Němec’s emotive faculties, perhaps for a cathartic
last lap of honour but you wouldn’t want to depend too much on that, seeing in
his mind’s eye some variation of Alice Steinerová, Veronika Voss, Elsbeth von
N____, whoever the hell she was supposed to be at that moment in Němec’s
subconscious, standing out of the wind in a smashed phonebooth, trying to get
word to him only the phone’s been kicked-in. Tears streaking her mascara. A
haunted desperate look in her eyes as she struggles & fails to light a cigarette:
her hands shake so hard the cigarette breaks in half, one end dangling like a bit
of severed finger, the ends of her blonde hair whipping her face. Someone
offscreen speaks her name & already she’s ceased to exist, a minor detail,
replaced by things too vivid to be real. Mirrorworld characters were stumbling
around in the dark — now flattened-out in depthless light — countless mental
photographs wanting nothing more than to be forgot, uncreated, abolished.
The film in his head was resolving itself towards that single inescapable
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point, the closing act, & whatever the characters chose to do from now on would
only bring them ever closer to it.
Like Scabby Marat
A door without a hinge. Perhaps that was enough — the problem had been
wrongly posed & by restating it the question it asked was abolished. Němec sat
pretty, waiting for the workmen to knock-off for the night. As far as he could
see the future had no synopsis. He sat in the watt gloom & breathed the dead
atmosphere. The smell of the velum, the leather attaché, the dank mattress, the
ancient dust. The longer he sat the more conscious he became of the numbness
in his body, it ached so much he couldn’t tell which part of his body was which.
If he’d had to stay that way much longer, his head would’ve come apart. By ten
the place was silent, as per § of City Ordinance / Coll., “on the
Protection of Public Health (Noise Curfews).” Boots tramping down the stairs.
Němec made a quick reconnaissance. The place was a wreck. All that
could be seen of the Prof’s former bureau was a maze of steel braces, put there to
hold up the roof, or the walls, or something. Every lightfitting had been gouged
out of the ceiling, the wood trusses exposed inside the holes, bits of decomposed
straw, rubble, compacted newsprint from the last refurbishment the rats hadn’t
got to yet. Above, the weight of the attic seemed to groan. Grey shadows played
around the rooms now that the windows were laid bare.
Down on the street there were only lurching shadows cast by the builders’
scaffolds as they creaked in the wind — TV voices through an open window —
the dripdrop of water from eaves. Were those, too, figments? It brought back
memories, figments of lost childhood… through a window… a derelict hotel
with a sagging bluegreen marquee… two men with a piano. Who were they?
Where had they come from? Where were they going? Scarecrows in trenchcoats,
pitching into the wind… the scene erased behind falling snow… a warped note
played backwards… Something led me to this, guided me and transported me, yet
communicated nothing. Once upon a time somebody else’s body had been sewn
inside his skin: a sanctuary inside a sanctuary — the outer shell & the inner shell
— like that secret room. Once they’d demolished all the rest of it, would the
room vanish, collapse back into some invisible fourth dimension?
Němec stalked through the apartment, listening at the walls. He cracked
open the door onto the stairwell, listened for footsteps, but there was nothing,
only the blood hammering in his ears. Down in the courtyard something was
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banging, like a rusty gate in the wind, only there was no wind. From the Tower
window he could see a light on in the caretaker’s flat — a pair of silhouettes were
framed in the doorway, carrying a sack. It looked wrong. By the time he reached
the bottom of the stairwell they were gone. Had he imagined them? He could
feel the panic working away inside him. Interior Ministry. Childhood visions of
men in coats. Orphanage. He checked the street entrance. Nothing. The smell of
unmixed cement, turned clay, hydraulics & generator fuel suffused the air. He
slouched back to the courtyard & rang the bell outside the caretaker’s flat, but
there was no answer. The parrot stared at him unblinkingly, one eye glued to the
inside of the window. Something reflected in the eye moved. Němec turned to
see what it was, but there was nothing behind him but the unlit entrance way.
He was about to ring the bell again when he caught a second reflection in
the window: something hideous stared out at him & he immediately understood
that look on Mrs Severínová’s face when he’d come down from the attic. His
face had the half-crazed look of someone who’d been buried alive in a grave &
had to dig themselves out. Glancing around, he saw a bucket beside the wood
pile. He grabbed hold of it & put it under the tap — the pipe, half-frozen,
shuddered. A viscous thread of water came out, but eventually he had enough to
fill the bottom of Hájek’s bath, once he’d hauled it upstairs & dunged the
cracked tiles & mortar out of the tub. The water was so cold it made the cold air
in the bathroom steam. Moonlight filled the window, turning everything to
bruises. Němec wrung the blood out of his shirt & hung it to dry on a pair of
screws sticking out of the wall where the mirror used to be. He did what he
could to undo the previous night, knees drawn up, breath turning to vapour,
scavenged soapcake mushing to pulp in his hand. Shivering.
At the end of it, he felt like an empty vessel in which vibrations of air
create an echo, & nothing more. He couldn’t help thinking of the Prof, who’d
died in that exact same spot, like scabby Marat, an unfinished game of chess —
what was it? The Fool’s Gambit? Himself as his own worst adversary… No sign
of a ghost in that light… And between then, the ghost & him, what was the
connection, apart from the likes of this, mere circumstance, all evidence of which
soon to be stripped away, dissembled, abolished? Soon the whole place would be
rubble to the rafters & then they’d tear the rafters down too, rip the guts out &
just leave the shell standing, a curio on the hillside for the sightseers to take a
gawk at: Up there’s where that Kelley did magic tricks for the Emperor (the old soak)!
Well, if the world really came to that, what’d be the point resisting? A
man lived here once — I knew him. But walls are just walls, like a shell when the
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creature inside it’s dead: hold it to your ear & you don’t hear an ocean, only the
ear’s echo — one ear listening to itself across a hole in time,. Which is the sound
a skull makes when it’s emptied of all superfluous matter, though maybe you
shake it & something rattles, the shrivelled remains. You could’ve smelled it if
you hadn’t believed there was nothing left in there, nothing to upset you with its
obscene presence after the fact. The inertia of it, closing in, the unremitting entropy,
shutting down the receptor nerves, static flooding the circuits…
Němec coughed. It was all he could do to feel his own body. And what
would they do with that once the rest of everything else had been disposed of?
Would they come for him in the middle of the night, some time when he wasn’t
expecting it? Or were his days numbered in any case? They’d simply come in one
day, not so far from now, & find what was left of him lying there like a patch of
scum around a plughole?
There had to be a way out of this.
And if you had to go through it all over again, you wouldn’t, would you?
He stood & wiped himself off with his hands, pulling on stale threads —
old superstitions of unwash passed-down, proofed against all weather by reek of
smoky bars & mothballs: camouflage. You live in your own stink long enough
anything else smells evil: enough people all live in the same stink together,
you’ve got the basis of a nation state right there. Only have to watch the old
threepiece doesn’t get up one day & walk of without you, Golem-like, start
running things its own way, just like them androids. Now there was a thought…
Ever wonder why strangers all got that peculiar whiff about ’em, kiddo?
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59
___________
HOSPITALITY
A room with armchairs, settee, reading lamps, bookshelves, tribal
masks hanging on the walls. Door stage-right, stairway stage-left.
At centre, a low table with two glasses & a decanter, an ashtray, an
open packet of cigarettes, a lighter. A drinks trolley. It’s evening.
Two figures, FAKTOR & the DWARF, enter separately through the door
on the right. FAKTOR wearing a crushed, burgundy polyester suit,
pink carnation in buttonhole, striped tie, short grey hair, goatee.
The DWARF -— with stringy pasted-on moustache —- is dressed in a
pork-pie hat, dirty beige raincoat, with brown corduroy trousers, &
carries a leather attaché case. They move slowly across the room,
taking it in. They’re relaxed, at ease.
DWARF:
They expecting us?
FAKTOR:
Expecting us? How could they be expecting us? No-one
ever expects us. There’re never any expectations where
we’re concerned.
DWARF:
Still. A first time for everything.
