The Combinations, page 131
individual furnishings, as well as various curios from the Imperial Bestiary.
Němec peered into the periscope lens at this strange Alice in Wonderland
construction. Like a world within a world, the veracity of its detail was uncanny
— the Botanical Institute by comparison represented a mere shadow.
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Surrounding this oddity, & filling the rest of the corridor, was a display of
tropical flora of many varieties. Strangler vines dangled from platforms high up,
bird of paradise, orchids & bougainvillea. At the end of the vestibule was a tall
cage with three blue macaws inside it. The birds hung there by their claws, eyes
pressed between the bars, grating their tongues against their beaks as Němec
approached. He eyed the parrots warily. The sound followed him along the
corridor & out beneath the high dome.
Faktor was waiting for him in the Victoria Regia pavilion, on the far side
of an artificial pond choked with broad, fleshy lilypads & insalubrious white
flowers. The water around them stirred with the mouths of ornamental carp
pensively gulping the air. High up, a pair of window-cleaners in mismatched
overalls could be seen through the glass, hanging suspended from ropes &
pulleys like mountaineers descending the sides of a glacier. Faktor watched
Němec attentively as he approached, eyes flickering beneath the brim of a black
borsalino, like a moyl with a cutthroat razor in his pocket. He wore a pair of
nearly opaque glasses perched halfway down his long nose. His former goatee
now extended up the sides of his face into a full-beard — there were tide marks
where the dye job had gone awry.
Just as he had been on the first occasion Němec had seen him, Faktor was
seated at a small table with a chessboard in front of him, only this time he was
leaning back in a large wicker chair, holding his pipe in his mouth & gazing at
Němec across the top of it. He motioned with his eyes for Němec to take the
seat opposite, which Němec did. The dwarf was nowhere to be seen — he
might, for all Němec knew, have at that very moment been ransacking the Prof’s
apartment in search of “the key.” But Němec had his doubts. He didn’t believe
that whatever “key” they were searching for could be found just by looking.
Something told him Faktor knew this also & that “the key” was altogether
elsewhere.
Except for the periodic stirring of water in the pond, the pavilion was
utterly silent. Němec sat down & was about to speak when Faktor held up his
hand to stop him. As on that first occasion in the winecellar, Faktor had
arranged a puzzle on the chess board in front of him. This time the puzzle was a
deceptively uncomplicated one. Němec was surprised to recognise it from one of
his evenings with the Prof: it was Réti’s two-pawn endgame. Němec sat there
obediently & watched his presumed adversary rehearse the scripted moves, as if
the whole thing was part of some recurring dream — the type of dream littered
with symbols & coincidences of the most blatant kind.
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Němec had only the vaguest interest in what message Faktor intended to
impart to him by means of this little demonstration. But whereas on the
occasion of their first meeting, “The flight of Napoleon from Russia to Paris”
had required a complicated orchestration of many pieces (to convey its epic
scope), Réti’s endgame required only four, & within the space of three short
moves the scenario was complete. Němec eyed Faktor impassively, waiting for
some sort of explanation for his summons, but none was forthcoming. He let his
attention shift to the pavilion’s minutely ordered architecture — from one
regulated environment to another — the enveloping edifice, the chessboard
arrangement of the glass panes. Coincidence?*
Faktor set his pipe down on the table & stroked his beard. Němec looked
at him & waited. He wondered if it was the man’s intention for him to’ve come
there just to watch him rehearse chess puzzles with himself. Faktor cleared his
throat finally.
‘The principle is simple,’ he said, in a tone of voice only slightly tinged
with irony. ‘Réti was a mathematical genius, but he also appreciated the
importance of psychology & perception… Look at the board… There are eight
squares from side to side… And eight squares from top to bottom… And yet
there are also eight squares running diagonally from one corner of the board to
the other… A piece capable of moving in any one of those directions would
travel the same distance, yet to the eye it appears that the diagonal is longer.’
He paused to be sure that Němec was paying attention.
‘You see,’ he went on, ‘in chess you have a mathematical quandary…
Measured by the number of squares, the sides & diagonal together describe an
equilateral triangle… But they also describe a rightangled triangle… In
Euclidian geometry the two are mutually exclusive. Another example of this
would be if you were to draw a triangle using the meridian lines of a globe. The
equator, the Greenwich meridian & the th parallel running through New
Orleans. A triangle, the sum of whose angles would not be degrees, but .
An impossibility, it would seem.’
While elaborating all this, Faktor rearranged the pieces on the board. Two
pawns, black & white, & two kings. Something about the way he spoke,
* Allegories of light & shadow, blindness & insight, irrationality & reason: the artificial life it promoted, whole vegetable micro-worlds, held in a type of abeyance, suspended animation,
awaiting transmutation into other, untold states, metamorphic curiosities, evolutionary puzzles
unpicked gene by gene, combined & recombined, grafted, hybridised, in the cause of the beautiful
idea or some fleshy abomination. Science preening itself in a mirror. [:]
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reminded Němec of the Prof. The two might’ve been twins when it came to
soliloquising. But Faktor’s soliloquies were the more tendentious, with an air of
having been scripted, prepared in advance, issued by who knew what higher
powers, secret chains of command, lords & potentates, wizards, goblins, table-
tapping Sibyls, fat little men with tawdry hand-me-down medals on frayed
ribbon, denizens of that hidden Parallel Polis tipping their hand at the great
game in which all this was just a sideshow, one little pawn.
‘In the most simplistic terms,’ Faktor leered at him, ‘the objective of Réti’s
puzzle is for white to achieve a draw. He can do this in two ways. Prevent the
capture of his own pawn, or threaten the capture of black’s. On the other hand,
black must prevent white’s pawn from reaching the last rank & queening, while
threatening to queen with his own pawn. The puzzle thus involves a dilemma, as
all puzzles do, but its solution is also a dilemma. Réti saw how in order to
achieve a draw white must create an impossible situation for black, so that any
move whatsoever would produce a result to white’s advantage. And how he
achieved this was by exploiting the paradoxical logic of the diagonal.’
A brief danse macabre once more ensued. With unfailing certitude, Faktor
demonstrated all the possible variations, the inexorable dénouement. Then
again. And yet once more. On each occasion, the struggle reached the foreseen
impasse. Němec wondered at this strange compulsion to repeat & re-illustrate
the obvious. Until it occurred to him, that this was precisely the point …
Réti’s two-pawn endgame. White to move and draw…
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‘The key, is for the white king to move as though away from both black’s pawn
& his own.’
Faktor regarded him with eyes empty of expression. Like the eyes of an
interrogator who already knows the answers. Who, instead of posing questions,
speaks in riddles, allegories, parables, to provoke some unconscious awakening
that might transform a closed scenario into an actual struggle. To restore a
fundamental relation. As if the point wasn’t to prove the futility of resistance,
but to draw out a confession.
‘Black,’ Faktor continued, ‘has two options, to capture white’s pawn or
progress his own. But he can only move one square at a time. Each unit of time,
in other words, is represented by one square, & each square, as it were, forms
part of white’s triangle. By exploiting the strange logic of the diagonal, white’s
king is able to be either equidistant in time or equidistant in space from the
piece he needs to defend & the one he must threaten. Elegant, no?’
He rearranged the pieces.
‘Watch again.’
Again Faktor repeated the same moves. Again Němec made a pretence of
observing.
‘Try as he might,’ Faktor lamented, ‘it’s impossible for black to realise any
other fate than the one white has created for him.’
The whole thing was a little like the genetic code of an extinct language.
Mathematically elegant, yet in a crucial way meaningless.
Faktor arranged the pieces as they’d been at the beginning.
‘Yes,’ he sighed, ‘poor black is caught. Decide he must — either to
threaten white’s pawn or advance his own. Yet whichever decision he makes, he
is in fact without a choice. The end has already been determined, though it will
only come into view for him when everything else has receded from the picture.
The one determining factor is Time, which is always against him. It is the
geometry of Destiny at work. Illusory, paradoxical, yet inescapable.’
Faktor looked up from the board.
‘All things being equal,’ he said, regarding Němec now with eyes fixed &
hard as polished slate, ‘it would seem to be rather like your own situation.’
857
61
___________
PEEPHOLES TO THE INFINITE
‘Did you hear the one about Buzz Aldrin falling down the steps of the Lunar
Module?* He was busy filming Neil Armstrong waving the stars-&-stripes —
One small step for the Aryan Brotherhood & all that — when he slipped & went
arse-over-tit, Super- & all. Smashed the lens on a moonrock just when
Armstrong was spouting the immortal words, & splonk! Had to re-stage the
whole biz on a soundstage back of the Paramount lot, only the genius at the
moviola forgot to edit-out the bit where the flag starts blowin’ about in slo-mo
’cause some klutz left one of them industrial aircon units or whatever runnin’ &
O.J. Simpson in whiteface under the helmet with them big gel-lights in his
oculars — you look real close at the finished product, you can see it ain’t no
whiteboy from Wapakoneta, Ohio…’
Well, & where’d that giant leap get everybody? Supposedly they used to
say back in ’, When the finger points at the moon ☝ the idiot looks at the finger.
The idiot was right to look at the finger. Nothing up there to see anyhow, no
Coon-in-the-Proverbial, no Big Cheese, no Star-Spangled neither. On account
of they landed under a giant fucking shamrock, where none a them Commies could
get a gander at what they was doin’. * What else you s’pose they did that for? To keep
outta the sunshine? Can’t’ve been all dark, or how’d they’ve filmed it? Reckon they took their own movie lights up there with ’em? And half of Barrandov, too?
‘Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!’
What you wanna remember, the Bugman’d say, is you can’t always know the
whole story. But sometimes you know MORE than the whole story — only you don’t
know which bits belong in it, and which bits don’t. Could be there weren’t no
astronauts at all. Wait till them Chizinks get up there ’n’ see if they find whitey’s flag.
But who’d be able to say for sure the swopes went there either, except they send
up a rocket & wait for it to come down again, call it Capricornhole in honour
of all thirdworld mankind takin’ that Big Leap Forward, hold a pressbang on the
* Like Comrade Yeltsin, hehe. [:]
* How many kosmonauts does it take to change bullshit to fatuous light? [:]
858
Yang-Tse with a coupla gooks in spacesuits been locked in a tincan somewhere
outta reach for a month in Inner Mongolia & the cameras snappin’ it all up,
papier-mâché moonrocks & Look, no Yankee flag! Hey whitey, where you been hidin’
up dere? Call the Man on all that Apollo fakeout ’n’ counterfake ’n’ see what he
do about it. Oh hell yeah, we was up there first, musta been some a them illegal aliens
zap down ’n’ stole Ol’ Glory. Call the Marines! We is gonna go nuke us some Martian
pootie pronto, Tonto…
What the eggheads back in Houston call reductio ad absurdum or maybe
it’s something else, deductione proprium culus…?
Like that joke about the two Ivans crossing Checkpoint Charlie Bridge
ogling the saints, one of them telling the other a story about a different pair of
Ivans, crossing a different bridge, in Ljubljana maybe, where they’ve got bronze
dragons instead of saints (supposed to wag their tails, them dragons, getting’ a
hard-on whenever once in a blue moon a virgin strays across, hehe), & one of
them’s gabbin’ to the other in Rusky about these two commissars in St
Petersburg this time, also crossing a bridge, if there’s a bridge in St Petersburg
where they have statues of dragons or saints, or even if there isn’t — maybe the
statues weren’t important, or maybe that was the point, that there weren’t any
statues on this bridge but that there should’ve been (airbrushed out, airbrushed in,
take yer pick) — & one of these commissars starts relating to the other
commissar a story about how there was once a bridge in Danzig, etc. , etc., the
gist being, in the midst of all this redux up uranus, back there where it all started,
in Golem City, the original Ivan number two, who’s been listening to this whole
rancid spiel so far without uttering a syllable, suddenly & with not the slightest
forewarning, pulls up in front of a passing likeness of Jan Nepomuk, flashes the
martyred motherfucker a bugeyed stare, screeches words to the effect that I’m
mad as hell ’n’ I ain’t gonna take this no more & hurls himself over the balustrade
into the river…
e
The moon hung in the window like the pockmarked face of an idiot.
December had halfway run its course — another circle was closing —
another fraction tending towards a whole, a completed instant in the revolutions
of sidereal Time, Entropy & the Cosmic Conspiracy. The measure was as good
as arbitrary: three-hundred-and-sixty-five revolutions-within-a-revolution between
859
now and that night — the night of “the Fall…” Earth with her minion satellite
revolving around the sun as ever she had, since before Copernicus & Galileo,
though more crowded up there with spacejunk & satellites & talkback radio
wafting out across the firmament, Heaven’s vault, stripped of her mystery now.
Was there a special significance in one world’s vector through space, its
alignments, its eclipses, its solstices & equinoxes? What did the equations
governing the brief span of years reveal, except that Time itself was a
selfenclosed algebra, signifying who-knew-what?
Somewhere in the back of Němec’s mind, a childish theatrical devil was
muttering lines got by rote, long ago, which only now, by accident of memory,
bearing down with full impetus, etc., saying — If man, this small world of
madness, considers himself to form a whole, I’m a piece of the piece that came before
Everything, a piece of the obscurity that gave birth to light.
Did the journey he’d embarked upon, therefore, begin nowhere & lead
nowhere? Did it exist, like a dream, in the infinite division of time, in the
marriage of unrelated instances, born of the antagonism of eternal absolutes? Of
the one & the zero? The all & the nothing? Its path, ambiguous, uncertain, no
longer a journey away from one location towards another, but an itinerary of
placelessness: the destination could be anywhere, or nowhere. All Němec could
guess was that somewhere, somehow, someone or something was expecting him:
a voice from a telephone, a face in a window, a key to a door.
e
One wrong turn leads to another.
North from the Botanical Gardens then east through the maze behind
Charles Square. Resin-coloured streetlamp filaments making haloes in the mist.
Trudging aimless past whiskey bars, wine bars, café bars, nonstop slot machine
