The Combinations, page 137
living off the fat of the air & all that. Still with
me? Watch how our Němec chisels at his hole,
admire the fortitude he displays working the
unresponsive stone, pissy slivers of bilgewater
trickling through the cracks — hunched in the
coffin-width of a dead-end, envisaging, perhaps,
the dead-end that lies beyond it, & the dead-end
beyond that. D’you reckon he has any regrets?
Thinking, as he excavates, of his fond friend
shovelling snow off the astroturf, or maybe
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lounging on a deckchair, warm‡ inside the
makeshift hothouse up there, high (but not so
high) above the City’s patchwork — as if in a
different hemisphere entirely, poking at an
ingrown toenail with a toothpick & waiting for
the New Year’s fireworks to start going off, a
bottle of the good stuff close at hand (just
imagining it makes poor Squillhead thirsty),
who’d’ve told him in any case? Nothing was ever
achieved in the world by saying goodbye, kiddo. Just
remember, if yer gonna go, don’t look back, you
won’t like what you see. And wasn’t the aim of
the game to find the most direct route out?
Well, like they say, sometimes the shortest way
home’s the longest way ’round, & sometimes a
straight line’s only the implied hypotenuse of an
opposed rightangle. Preschool Pythag you’d
think anyone could get their heads around. But
nothing, as they say, is quite as it meets the eye,
& when all you’ve got to see around the
metaphorical corner with’s a light at any
moment about to sputter — not as straight-
forward as you’d hope it’d be, if you were in his
shoes — figuring by now that the solution to the
big puzzle’s always just another puzzle. What
came first, the clucky Sphinx or riddled egg?
And how to keep the lid on the fact it’s all a
scam in any case? What? There isn’t one? No
riddle? And how about all them plagues? Just plain
bad luck, was it? Like the masked mystery of
mysteries they keep locked-up with the
communion wine & the wily kid stealing into
the temple after dark, saying to the virgin
priestess how a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta
do, eh, Sphinxy? And wasn’t that the real reason
‡ Balmy’s the word.
xxxi
(on all fours like that, Blue Angel wings &
vaselined Dietrich smirk) our femme-fatale-on-
the-make turned tail & threw her lithesome self
from the high buttress? Wind in her hair, a
supple half-pike — only to have her very High
Cinematic gesture spoiled by that toothless
travesty, blind Tiresiarse, who just couldn’t help
himself & had to spill it to all & sundry —
Forget the dame! It was the kid all along! He’s a
bad egg! Scrambled! All messed up! THERE AIN’T
NO GODDAMN CHICKEN! And of course
they gave the old beak the credit due a
nostradame of the people, with those
disconcerting dugs reminding how he’d crossed
the line in spectacular fashion himself in days of
yore & had first hand on what he was clucking
about. Well it always suits someone to take a
nutter at his word. Ecco, ecco, il vero pulchinella!
And that’s the black & the white of it, hehe. No
yolk! Hehe. Worse & worse. Can’t you at least try
for a little pathos? Something to wet the cheeks
before we dry them? To make the long arduous wait
worth our while? How about a limerick? I’ve
been saving this one…
There once was a young man from Cheb,
with a nob like a thick loaf of bread —
so hard when stale
he could hammer a nail
and when fresh, as soft as his head, duh-dum.
No point giving-in to coldblooded despair —
though at this point, pitiable Squillhead there
might’ve expected the old ghosts to put in an
appearance, give him a send-off — the Prof in
his portable bathtub cracking wise about the
benefits of taking the waters, hehe, though
Management would’ve probably nixed that —
xxxii
no way to fit the fusty windbag into the
programme at this late stage, the way he had a
tendency to blather on the moment he got
started — maybe later, after the job’s done,
there’ll be time for a chinwag to last through till
Auld Lang Syne…
There once was a man called Enoch,
famed for the length of his…
And the rest? Would they ever even think of
poor Squillhead again? The Prof’s ghost, the
Good Doctor, Faktor-the-Redaktor & his
domesticated dwarf, shyster Bareš, pouty
Petrovná, the racy redhead at the Natural
Sciences Museum, Zahradník the diligent
footnoter, Alice Steinerová, who else…? Not
much of a rollcall — no Cecil B. DeMille cast-
of-biblical-zillions — the others, nothing but
filler for a six-foot pothole now, lorem ipsum
dolor sit amet, the sloughed-in background to a
story buried before its time, an automatic
typewriter job, their vital statistics as arbitrary &
inert as they are. That, possibly, would be their
revenge, come the time, when all the fictions are
brought naked before the Grand Tribunal of the
Last Judgement, when all the alibis turn to frass.
Perhaps they all knew better than to be present
at the End. Not the story’s end but the Real
End, the one that goes on ending even after our
heroic Squillhead here’s drawn his last. The End
that can’t be written, that has no way of being
written, because it comes after all that. Like that
chicken & that humptydum egg. But in the
meantime, readers, things’ve been moving along,
the hole in that wall down there’s getting wider,
the effort finally seeming to add-up to
xxxiii
something — surprise, surprise: he’s even begun
pushing the stones through to the other side, it
hardly seems any work at all, peering in with his
flashlight as the faintest whiff of a draught out
of the black space beyond tickles his nose &
brushes his ears, like a ghost making its getaway
— the tombstink of the anterooms of Purgatory,
where even rats fear to tread. Busy, busy. Look!
He’s already made a hole wide enough to get his
Squillhead through, shining flashlight left &
right, up & down, to discover in there a
chamber to all appearances square or, rather,
cube-like, though barely more than a metre
wide, ceiling too low to stand under by half, the
floor lost beneath primeval mud, walls dripping
with vegetal growths where no light has ever
shone. It’s almost an anticlimax, we might’ve
expected something more definitive, a roaring
torrent, or some hidden trove with a corpse
guarding it, but a four-square chamber will have
to do. Shadow of a man that Němec is, he still
only just manages to push himself through the
hole with nothing to spare, dragging behind
him the sum total of his worldly possessions, for
all the good they’ll ever be to him now — a
garbage sack weighed down by a useless
wordmachine (the only masterpiece he’ll ever
write) surveying the cracks in the walls, dark
with foliated hieroglyphs, a veil of signs,
funerary texts. But their forms are rapidly fading
as the flashlight fades, while the fragments of
that mock mysterium, the drowned Book, swirl
around him. If possible, the noise inside the
chamber’s even louder than the noise in the
tunnel. He’s made it just in time to watch it all
sink into a kind of twilight. We can hear the
river on four sides, the groaning of the floodtide
xxxiv
beyond the walls, imagining what it must feel
like to be trapped in a closed space that seems
only to get smaller & smaller as the darkness
contracts — a box not even Houdini could
sleaze his way out of. Without seeing as clearly
as we might wish, we can still detect how the
level of the water has begun, very gradually, to
rise. We can imagine poor Squillhead feeling
that he’s growing lighter & heavier at the same
time — a buoy in a tidal estuary, or balloon
weighted to a rock & the rock like an anchor in
the sea as the balloon seeks & fails to rise above
the current. Perhaps he’s reminded of that blind
girl on the stairs of the socalled Faust House —
how long ago was that already? Little girl
waving a red balloon on a stick. As the darkness
stretches out its tendrils towards him, will he
finally learn to see? What Braille would ever
amount to a red balloon? What word would ever
convey a touch that wasn’t itself touched? Eye of
the sixth sense. What’s she doing here now, in
the dark, in the deafening dark, under the river,
in Squillhead’s mind? Prophetess of the
stairway, balloon-child — were she to reach out
now & touch his thoughts, what would she read
in them? Is there something there he can’t see?
Something kept secret from him but visible to
others, to us, even the blind? Something written
across his forehead, perhaps, carved from flesh,
clay, rivermud, signature of God-the-Creditor,
the Demiusurer, the Mad Rabbi, that whole
consortium of mugs that made him: METH —
EMETH? (Blah blah blah.) As the water rises,
our reluctant protagonist appears to be overcome
by a strange urge. In the closely confined space
he’s started to strip off his rags — first emptying
the pockets: pills made colourless in the gloom,
xxxv
let dissolve in the swirling waters — identity
papers with name actual or assumed, irrelevant
in either case — the cellar key, let slip between
fingers — the dark ink-smudge of Devil &
Carmelite in xeroxed duplicate — folded
coversheet of that other VM with faintly green-
glowing watermark (strange, for a watermark, to
glow in the dark, but Squillhead here’s beyond
noticing such things at this stage), heraldic
eagle, wings spread, grasping in its talons a
laurel wreath, ancient rune inscribed within — a
black horseheaded chesspiece — the obscure
allegory contained in a pair of black&white
photographs torn into approximate squares &
scattered on the ebbtide — crooked stick broken
in two, etc. Then, article-by-article, he exposes
his unblushing Squillself — jacket folded across
the threshold, shirt, trousers, likewise, & the
rest, sopping shoes filling-in the space at the top
— naked now as John on Patmos with only a
dented dunce-hat brushing the stalactites —
asquat upon booksack, torch in hand, awaiting
the visions, the dream of prenatal life in the
unseasonal warmth of his own womb —
watching the images on the paper dissolve as the
flashlight becomes nothing but a dull ember.
Like him, we feel a threshold’s been finally
crossed — there’s really no going back this time
— the muddy water continuing to rise, the
encircling current, his body the axis of its spiral,
the fluid mandala — no mythical “still point”
now, only the slowly eroding suspension of a
faintly held disbelief whose homily for today is
Up Shit Creek and No Paddlepop. The torchlight,
in a final paroxysm, flickers & dies. Picture, in
its place, a dialectical porthole onto some
remote parallel universe, where at this very
xxxvi
moment K in his last confinement is about to
attempt the bold leap — stepping out from the
precipice, in that gap in Time when everything
irreversible promises to come undone, the laws
of gravity suspended, the pendulum forever
caught in the infinite regress of its arc, plumbing
the proverbial nadir — yes, just as if he (K)
himself had become the living purport & tenor
of that pissant Zeno’s parting paradox: no more
some jesting alshemist blarneying backwards out
his own arse, so to speak, but the very vortex &
personified azimuth of (now try saying this with
a straight face) Creation & Uncreation itself! No
makebelieve Maxwell’s Demon, this! No
ventriloquist’s midget Mephisto! But a trueblue
God’s Eye negentropy Wunderwaffe to undo
Genesis with (if only he, his kryptonite K-self, so
desireth)! Piloting his mortal remains headfirst
out the tower window through the pungent
night air, up, up, arcing over with arms out
wide, putting the brakes on to take in the view
from On High, the Schluß in Brennschluß,
slowing the picture down frame-by-frame till it’s
long past any regular kind of slo-mo & crosses
the line into a sort of molecule-by-molecule
P.O.V. where he can actually see all the
nitrogens, oxygens, argons, carbon dioxides that
make up the usually invisible surrounds, vapours
bristling with static, meteorological conditions
of a decidedly unprecedented kind, his mind’s
gyroscope keeping the whole thing just on the
edge of spiralling out of control ( you can’t get any
closer to the STILL POINT than this, kids!) — the
second hand on our man’s bizarrely
anachronistic Quartz wristwatch trembling,
coming to a stop, & even appearing to — this
can’t be possible — move in reverse! Well, you
xxxvii
can change the time but you can’t change Time,
as the old saying goes, & just when K’s begun to
convince himself he’ll stay up there forever ( The
Key! The Key! I’ve found it! Der Schlüssel!) — or
maybe drift off into the clouds on angel-wires,
some latterday Assumption in a sudden shaft of
moonlight… Yep, just at that moment,
something comes right up as if out of nowhere
& slaps the earless ass right in the kisser. Wakey-
wakey sunshine! That something being an
accelerating spheroid mass of approx . x
kg. All things being relative.
Golem City
January — January
xxxviii
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Louis Armand, The Combinations
