The Combinations, page 14
psychiatry — correction — normalisation — the gross and the transformed. If
additionally it meant restitution of property & liberal democracy, it also meant
fixing what was “broken” & breaking what deviated from the status quo. It
meant the hidden hand of the free market & the hand of God. Most of all, it
meant picking up the pieces & being made to go on, despite oneself & against
one’s will, for the Greater Good. But what Greater Good? What was Němec to
it, or it to him?
In the chill of the corridor…
Something about the colour of the walls (stark white with a horizontal strip of
bile-green running waist-high) made time seem to pass very slowly. Němec stared
at it waiting for whatever was going to happen next. A cheerfully Dantesque nurse
had left him there, having wheeled him across from the Convalescents Ward. The
green strip had a rather emphatic texture to it, like something squashed into the
wall. With almost no effort, Němec made the texture move around inside his eye
— green dislocated stick-things flopping side-to-side, like a parade of foetuses
playing Punch & Judy with each other — till he got bored with that & stared at
the cracks in the white.
Later a different nurse appeared, straightened Němec’s dressinggown,
tightened his straps, patted everything into place, fussed around behind him,
heady perfume trailing in the air, gave his ear a tweak & read out the name
inscribed on the clipboard hanging from the back of his chair — as if to be sure
it was really him: Nye-metz, voice full of silent question marks, suggesting
something about it (the name) ought to’ve amused her, but… He felt the nurse’s
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fingers trace the pink scars on his tenderised head, puckered around the stitch-
holes, still visible through the stubble, then down the nape of his neck —
‘Ooh, what have we been doing with ourselves? Naughty, naughty!’
The nurse wheeled the chair about & backed him up to the blue door.
Knuckles rapping on wood & that voice in his ear again —
‘You’ll be a good little boysiewoysie now, won’t you, & do exactly what
your told, mmm?’
And then, left again to wait in this altered arrangement, the nurse exiting
the scene by another door accompanied by the perfunctory sounds of white
flatsoled shoes coming along the corridor, approaching from the opposite end —
a group of male orderlies in blue smocks, John Beradino lookalikes, swapping
banter at high volume. A preview of next Monday’s instalment of
GENERAL HOSPITAL
I was listenin’ to the radio the other day about to knock off some old bat’s tit when
about this psycho in Beverly Hills with a stash
they discovered she was stil alive?’
of body parts belonging to ol’ movie stars ’n’
‘What I tell you? Pure silicon!’
stuff, nicked from some big exclusive
‘Ty vole!’
cryogenics lab…’
‘Nah, neighbours complained about a
‘And snuff?’
rotten stink & it not even election time.
‘Ty vole!’
Y’know how it is in Southern California, mid-
‘Planned to sell ’em back to their original
summer & a power outage killed the
owners, I suppose?’
refrigeration. Cops got wind of it & went
‘Ah, pull the other one!’
’round to find a freezer full of goodies. Had
‘The old nip&tuck, eh? Bit stitched on themselves a bit of a stakeout, harhar.
here, bit sliced off there.’
Couple of days later this Boris Karloff type
‘Picture it, Ivana Trump with Ronny comes home from a little gardening
Reagan’s head!’
expedition to Potter’s Field.’
‘And King Kong’s brain!’
‘Welcome back Potter!’
‘Ty vole!’
‘Certified nutjob. They couldn’t touch the
‘What Comrade Marx said, Every
quack, though. Quack hired some bignote
economy can be reduced to the problem of attorney. Walked, scot-free.’
supply and demand.’
‘Ty vole!’
‘Ty vole!’
‘Always the little guy takes the rap.’
‘Apparently some famous Hollywood
‘Yeah, just like Lee Harvey. Reckon
quack was bank-rolling the whole show…’
there’s a connect? Magic bullet & all that?’
‘Ty vole!’
‘Whole thing sounds like a scam, you ask
‘Bride of Frankenstein, vole!’
me. Insurance or somethin’.’
‘Don’t cry for me, Ne-cro-feel-ya…!’
‘’Course it was a bleedin’ scam, vole!’
‘Da-da-da-dead in A-mer-i-ka! Da-da-
‘Hey, anyone up for a few cold one’s
da-dead in A-mer-i-ka!’
after lunch?’
‘So what happened next, doc?’
‘ Ty vole!’
‘They were out digging at Mount Sinai &
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Trailing the orderlies at a distance, a Ward Zombie shuffled in a pair of
oversized flipflops, mumbling, thick-spittled lips, catheter dragging on the floor.
Thn mun, thnn mmm, thth mnunth, thm unnn. Němec glanced after the orderlies
then back at the zombie with his leaky catheter weaving patterns on the
linoleum, flip-flop-flip, then down at his own legs strapped to the wheelchair. So
this’s what it’s come to, eh? Once more entirely in their hands. And then the door
opened & the nurse had him inside faster than he could say Run for your life!
Behind the Blue Door
Behind the blue door of the Rehab Unit was a very large room divided by a
complex arrangement of curtains & walled partitions into a labyrinth of cubicles-
within-cubicles-within-more-cubicles. The impression was of an improvised
bureaucracy hastily set up in the midst of a siege in a museum of corrective
medicine. At the far end of the room a tall fume cupboard, reaching almost to
the ceiling, held a collection of specimen jars containing oddments & curios:
malformed tendons, arthritic joints & jawbones distended from the effects of
elephantiasis — a thick layer of dust, decades old, was spread out around them
on the shelves. At the other end, a bank of cathode tubes, oscillators & discharge
chambers, heaped above a row of filing cabinets, flanked on either side by
traction devices that too-readily evoked scenes from the Inquisition. Connecting
the two ends of the room was a long corridor. Its floor was a patchwork of
linoleum & herringbone parquet, panelled with oblique shadows cast by a row of
high windows facing onto Charles Square. From there, visible in the far corner
of the park, was the chapel of John Nepomuk beside the salmon pink façade of
the Faust House. Through the denuded trees in the park it was just possible, in
the afternoons before sunset when the light fell across the window just-so, to
observe the point diagonally adjacent to the socalled Faust House where the
tramlines forked — one turning towards the river & the Friedrich Engels
Embankment, the other snaking down into the valley past the Botanical
Gardens’ glass pavilion.
The Devil take the hind parts…
During sessions at the Rehab Unit, the nurse in charge — Nurse Peklá (or
perhaps it was Pěkná) — maintained an obsessional monologue against
Foreigners, Gypsies & Zhids. She spoke calmly, with the equipoise of a true
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fanatic. Sensing no contradiction, she appeared equally in thrall to the romantic
cult of faraway places: Lichtenstein, the Jungfrau, the Frauenkirche in Dresden,
Schnitzelstadt, Karelia, Innsbruck. Němec was struck almost at once by the scent
that lingered whenever the nurse’s uniform brushed against him: a smell of
carbolic or dead ants crushed & rubbed against the skin. The whiteness of the
nurse’s uniform brought to mind the whiteness of women’s inner thighs in
billboard advertisements, or the statues above the portico of the Municipal
Library. He closed his eyes, but it was hopeless. She was already there, sneering
back at him in the dismal room of his mind, naked & hairless & cold as cut
stone.
The Treatment
The treatment followed an unerring routine consisting principally of repetition
& manipulation: 1. injections, 2. a numbed flexing & rotation of joints, 3.
various complicated forms of electrical stimulation, 4. being pinned to a narrow
stretcherbed like a vivisectionist’s frog, in a cubicle rigged with a large grey metal
box, monitors & dials. The box produced weird hypnotic music, as if a whole
orchestra of gutstringed instruments had split themselves endwise. Němec fixed
his mind upon it while the nurse & a pair of orderlies (mute thicknecked twins
in white dungarees & black wellies) attached electrodes, alligator clips, smeared
conducting gel, applying high-voltage alternating current to the scarred most
sensitive parts of his corpus corporum. After, manhandled back into his chair, he
was escorted by elevator down to the basement, exposed concrete walls sliding
past from one level to the next till far underground. Naked fluorescents hung
from the low ceiling of yet another corridor, at the end of which an archway gave
onto a kind of peristyle hall shrouded in mist. Echoing in an indeterminate
distance, voices moaned. The air was stifling. Pale ghostlike figures shifted
against a curtain of white, appearing & disappearing behind tiled columns. A
metal sink with a row of pressure hoses punctuated the mist. A steam chest
stood beside it like an Egyptian sarcophagus, a red thermostat eye leering out of
it. Across the archway, a dyslexic white-on-green mosaic perspired into the fog:
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HYDRAPOTHY
They continued through a maze of shower rooms & baths — the sound of the
orderly’s rubber soles taking up the rear, enlarging or fading with the
fluctuations in atmosphere. When they arrived at their destination, the rehab
nurse was already waiting. Němec felt a kind of sickening elation. The room
they had arrived at was a room just like the others, tiled white, with a bench on
one side covered with a plastic sheet. Here a second series of treatments ensued.
One of the mutes unbuckled the chair while his twin took Němec under the
arms & raised him up. His legs dangled. The nurse narrowed her eyes, as though
watching something pleasantly distasteful. Curtains up on the shower block scene!
What’s our favourite game today, then, boys and girls? Rub-a-dub-dub? Lilywhite
pillbox hat, white pinafore, white stockings, white shoes, white all the way down
to her white-of-whites. She clicked her tongue — a wet, sticking sound.
Pizzicato. Němec let his body go slack in anticipation. Perhaps distant strains of
Shostakovich. In the very middle of the room a hand-cranked metal hoist
straddled a large trapdoor, like a pair of compasses describing a black circle in
the tiled floor. A wire-&-leather harness dangled from the hoist, gibbetlike.
While the nurse went on clicking her tongue, the first orderly walked over &
pulled the trapdoor up by a handle. Below, a source of freezing water churned
out of the darkness.
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7
___________
THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT
The Voynich Manuscript was & remains one of the Great Conundrums of the
Known World — if not merely of Renaissance philology.* Composed by an
Unknown Author, in an Unknown Language, it had, over the course of its
moderately long history, attracted the various attentions of occultists, amateur
riddlers, pseudoscientists & crackpots of every stripe from the four corners of the
globe: each obsessed with a Dark Ages awaiting illumination, Secrets Most
Profound still to be unconcealed — conspiracy nuts hunting the missing link in
the great chain of paranoia, ancient sewer speleologists, Nazi bunker-moles,
Raiders of the Lost Ark — adepts of the universal hermetic, revised, corrected &
expanded Theory of Everything — all, like the proverbial moth to the perennial
flame, drawn into the Manuscript’s vortex to be consumed in eructations of insane
mothman gibberish.
Somewhere along the line, the Prof managed to get his hands on a
complete facsimile copy: he carried it about with him in a brown leather attaché
case. Always at hand, its faded greyblack calligraphy within valleys of sepia,
bound in a simulacrum of undistinguished vellum (creased at the edges &
heavily seamed), the Manuscript was his secret prize. The attaché case was
propped on the toilet seat beside the bath when the Prof died. Had any agent of
foul play chosen to look inside they’d’ve found a bundle of incomprehensible
scribble on gloss paper bearing the imprint of the Beinecke Rare Book &
Manuscript Library, reference number MS . Possibly it even now resided in
one of those metal boxes in the basement of Strahov Monastery, courtesy of the
dead Prof’s dead wife. If so, what had the archivists made of it? It might turn up
in a catalogue as almost anything: psychiatric art, an almanac of Oriental
pornography, a child’s doodlebook.
How the facsimile came into his possession in the first place, the Prof
never explained. There were many things about the Prof that were never
explained — secrets that perished in his wife’s auto-da-fé (rumours spawned in
* Or late Medieval? [:]
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exile, those nebulous Ostmark years post-War, in the chaos of Rome after
Mussolini, when no-one would’ve passed too many remarks about an obscure
footnote-hunter on the run from the Bolsheviks, hustling, trading, thieving even,
in league with who-knows-what dark powers: sinister antiquarians, corrupted
priests, librarians on the take, disillusioned academics, blackmarketeers, each
with an eye on the gold standard & non-inflationary dollars — they’d’ve sold
their grandmothers for a ten percent commission without batting an eyelid).
The Voynich Manuscript wasn’t your run-of-the-mill pastime for retired
boffins. It wasn’t just that it was “mysterious,” it also possessed an aura of
danger, of insalubrious transactions, shadowy cloisters in which the unwary
might easily come to a sticky end — professional envies & conspiracies to test
even the most credulous of willing believers. There were other dangers, too.
Having for centuries remained indecipherable, the manuscript presented to the
more rationally constituted mind a schizophrenic’s compendium of delusions —
Wölfliesque mental hieroglyphs, infantile bestiaries, anatomic weirdness, faux
naïf, abominable, phantasmagoric — Rube Goldberg allegories of alchemical
transformation, menageries of naked sybarites, bizarro LSD cosmologies,
Horus-eyed horoscopes…
You get the picture.
Perhaps suspecting they were being led a merry dance, a persistent
number of commentators over the years maintained that the Manuscript was
little more than an elaborate hoax, concocted by none other than the oft-
maligned alchemist Edwarp K, for purposes variously speculated upon. Versions
of this “theory” proliferated in many forms, though none founded upon much
more than the most umständlich of circumstantial evidence. A competing rumour
attributed authorship to K’s one time employer & unhappy companion, John
Dee,* & yet another to the thirteenth century Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon.
The known facts were few & disappointing. The Manuscript itself was
purportedly discovered in a remote villa in Frascati, in , by an eccentric
antique book dealer & collector, known to the world as W.M. Voynich.
o
Born auspiciously on Halloween , in a long-abolished Russian province of
Lithuania, Wilfrid Michael Voynich (a.k.a. Michał Habdank-Wojnicz, a.k.a. Ivan
* Whose name, incidentally, derives from the Welsh for black. [:]
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Kiecevsky), was the scion of a dissolute branch of the Polish nobility. His father
was a petty bureaucrat who wore a sash. Upon graduating with a degree in
chemistry at Moscow University, Michał Wojnicz pursued the only career his
ancestry qualified him for, that of a dilettante nationalist. As a member of
Narodnaya Volia & Proletarjat (would-be militant groups riddled with police
informers), Wojnicz engaged in antiTzarist revolutionary activity & was duly
arrested in St Petersburg. One day while awaiting trial, Wojnicz looked out his
cell window at the gallows square & noticed a young golden-haired woman
