The Combinations, page 2
leatherbound folios — & between the bookcases, a narrow iron door with
barred aperture staring out of it at eye-level.
xv
Wrapped in gloom & laboratory stench, the man sits huddled over the
escritoire, unkempt hair snaking from beneath a black coif. The lower half of his
waxlike face remains hidden behind a grey beard peppered with morsels of
foodstuff — a stained lace collar lies dishevelled beneath it (the beard), framed
by an unbuttoned doublet & embroidered black robe whose pattern, in the
halflight, is rendered ambiguous, vaguely geometric: interwoven pentagrams,
crescent moons, circles in disbalanced concentricity redolent of Ptolemaic
cosmographies. A matted ermine trim droops from the man’s shoulders like a
decayed carcass with flies hovering around it. With little effort of the
imagination, one might rightly guess this to be a replica of some alchemist’s den,
cell, coven from times of yore, executed with a disconcerting eye to detail whose
veracity is nevertheless undone by the visible layers of dust that, to varying
degrees of thickness & greyness, have settled over the entire tableau.
As the eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, a detail previously overlooked
comes into focus. Propped incongruously against the escritoire is a Rostov
MK reel-to-reel tapemachine — СДЕЛАНО В МАТУШКЕ-РОССИИ*
— a pair of twinned plastic spools ornamenting it like some technofetish bustier.
The body of the tapemachine is stealth-black, the spools respectively: Shanks-
Armitage white (the left one, trailing a red strip of magnetic tape), & aspic (the
other, showing an inch of brown tape wound about its core like matjeshering) —
a likewise-brown strip of tape runs between the two of them, passing midway
across a pair of exposed tapeheads, capstans & pinch-rollers. Meanwhile, a
greyfaced babička in brocaded headscarf, seated in a straightbacked chair
propped beside the curtained entranceway (via which, a dozen schoolchildren
accompanied by their teacher have just filed — the children obediently
twobytwo, boygirl-girlboy, leftright, Little Pioneer red scarves, uniform-blue
shirts, ten-degrees-darker greyblue skirts, trousers, standard-issue white shin-
length socks, tan-brown rubbersoled shoes), puts aside a bundle of knitting,
stands creakily & stoops, three four five steps over to the tapemachine, one
arthritic Babajaga poking-finger snagging the X button: an unseen current
thence made to flow etherless from wallsocket to tapehead-coil by
transmutations most miraculous, invoking fluctuant humours of magnetisation.
Instantly the machine whirs, the spools spiral into rotorrelief, the tape slithers, a
pair of occulted loudspeakers crackle & pop quadrophonally if not
tetragrammatically. ( Patience dearests!)
* Mammy’s Milk, Inc.
xvi
As the Little Pioneers stand attentive, gawping from the alterside of a
cordon of burgundy eightply, the beeswax pallor of the alchemist seated at his
escritoire, glass-eyed under heavy folds of wizened eyelids, grows eerily refulgent.
As it does so, the magnetic imprint on the reel-to-reel tape induces, by a current
proportionate & so-to-say analogous to the original Ur-signal (decoded if not
decorded by the tapeheads’ combined Champollion-effect), a high-pitched
whinnying hiss. Suddenly animate, the alchemist’s lips tremble yellowgreen,
dilate, contract, part & resuture themselves, their vaguely gross palpitations
suggestive, thanks to a slight technical malfunction, of an advancing dementia
— in any case, the operations of the mouth anticipate by several seconds
(without seeming to be at all related to it) a stream of sounds at the very limits of
whatever might be characterised as speech. Haaaaaaaa! The schoolchildren
elbow one another. Heeeeeeee! The schoolchildren titter. Raising his head, the
alchemist fixes them with boreal stare. Is it alive? they seem to wonder. An actor
with makeup, playing dead? An audiotronic waxworks dummy? A carnival
sideshow light-trick with mirrors & invisible guywires: the Iceman, the Bearded
Lady? KA-KA-! the unsynced tapemachine booms, an angry Jove, a wrathful
Jehovah. Hiiiiiiii! the mad alchemist ventriloquises, rictus-mouthed now,
touched by the Almighty. KA-KA-! — baum! — KA-KA-PITAL — baum! — ist
ein gen-e-ral, eeee-ter-nal ree-la-tion von NA-NA-TUR! — baum! — Hoooooooo!
The children back away, retreat, looking decidedly uneasy now. Their
teacher taps her right shoe with studied impatience — red patent leather with a
cross-strap & modest, one-inch heal, bought especially with a voucher for the
last-but-one May Day parade — whose sole, despite several patchings &
mendings, has already begun to wear through: in addition to which, beneath the
vinyl & cardboard instep, she’s recently (& to her considerable chagrin)
discovered the telltale black-inked MADE IN CHINA quite blatantly concealed
there — despite fulsome assurances from the Baťa shop assistant about genuine
homegrown factory produce, the real thing & not some cheap knockoff
imitation, sheered, stitched, glued & tacked by comrades in Gottwaldov, pride
of their very own Cheskoslovnikian Socialist Republik. Peering down at them
now she wonders if they don’t make her look a little like that Dotty in The
Wizard of Oz — & thinking this, vaguely expecting that ridiculous cybernated
goblin there behind the rattling escritoire to suddenly shout I AM THE
INVINCIBLE THE ALLPOWERFULL THE TERRIBLE! Foolish thought.
xvii
Instead, through a storm of tape-hiss increasing in volume exponentially, or as-if
exponentially,* this pseudo-Oz berates the by-now thoroughly apprehensive
huddle of Little Pioneers with a ten-minute-long garbled** diatribe about***
(A) the material-dialectical foundation of knowledge?
(B) ideology & false consciousness?
(C) English industrial occultism (from Gerald Winstanley to Edward
Kelley) or/& the alchemical-cabbalistic origins of the Western
freemarket?
(D) all of the above?
(E) none of the above?
— jaw aflap, head jolting back&forth in a convulsion of overly emphatic nods
which threaten, at any moment, to send it — wig, coif & all — rebounding in a
spray of spittle off the cluttered escritoire onto the museum’s scuffed-black
linoleum, hehe, thumpthumpthump, rolling to a precipitant stop like the return of
the proverbial repressed right between some poor unfortunate Lenka’s or Lukáš’s
polyblend shoelaces: fringed, where the neck used till recently to be, with
anachronistically machinefiligreed lace, copper wires jutting from the chasm —
exposed rheostats & diodes & transistors erupting in a shower of cartoon
asterisks & exclamation points — doubletted torso juddering, trembling,
convulsing in horrible-to-behold Jacobean deathrattle: Hu-u-u-u-u-u-u-u!
As the recording ends, the lights dim — the waxworks dummy slumps
forward in silhouette against the dull afterglow of alchemical apparatuses. The
teacher, back straightened, early-middleage paunch conscientiously retracted,
leads the disconcerted schoolkiddies back out the way they came, past a small
ten-by-fifteen framed reproduction hanging beside the door. It appears to depict
a room very much like the one they’re in the process of evacuating. Legible, now
that light floods in through the parted curtain, a small rectangular plaque
screwed to the wall, at child’s-eyelevel beneath the picture frame, reads:
Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom, by Hans Vredeman de Vries, . None,
however, appear to notice it. Next up, the teacher informs her Pioneer
munchkins, they’re off to see a famous scaled replica of the turbine room from
* Of which, seated beside the door with knitting needles tacktacktacking, the ancient assistant
remains tranquilly oblivious.
** de facto? a priori? ad hoc?
*** Speculatively.
xviii
Bratsk Station, patiently (from firsthand memory) reconstructed in bleached
pine-needles by two civil engineers, twin brothers in fact, while convalescing in a
quote-unquote sanatorium north of Lake Baikal & noted (the replica) for its
astonishing veracity, its exactness of detail, its true-to-life-ness. In addition, she
adds, provided they’re all on their very bestabest lunchbreak behaviour, they
might afterwards even be permitted to see a documentary film about the heroic
comrades at the Leningrad Metal Works. FOUNDARIES (oops!), FOUND-
ATIONS… LAID ON BLOOD STAND FIRM!
The teacher’s voice trails off — the last children are filing out from the
alchemist’s den between black motheaten drapes, glancing back at the now-silent
automaton. Peeeeeeee! a boy cries (the teacher out of earshot already, leading the
way down the corridor in clatterheeled Dotty-shoes carbuncular). Poooooooo!
shrieks another to nervous giggles. The babička meanwhile, greyvisaged,
knitting bundled, has hunched her slow way back across the room to re-set the
tape machine, send the voice hindways into its box: the room twitters with
backspeak — & for as long as it takes the tape to rewind, the scene is of an old
woman in a park feeding breadcrumbs to sparrows. The __ button clicks as the
spinning wheels come once more to a stop — the little white digits on the
fidgety counter, freeze-framed at zero.
xix
a. En Passant
1
___________
They Say
‘They say,’ the ghost mused, holding his left hand palm-out like a juror taking an
oath, ‘that the fingernails continue to grow even after death.’
The Prof’s ghost* was sitting by the roadside on a snowdrift, dressed in a
brown woollen coat the colour of old chemical jars, paring his fingernails with a
pocket knife. Lying barely a metre away was a grey horse. There was no doubt
the horse was dead, flogging it was never going to be any use.
Němec stood there like an undertaker after a funeral watching them, the
ghost & the dead horse. He wondered who the horse was supposed to belong to.
The Prof flicked away a piece of blackened fingernail & peered across at him
through pale watery eyes. Němec blinked back. The faintly falling snow made a
vortex around a cone of orange lamplight. It was impossible to tell what time it was.
‘Illusionary, of course,’ the ghost added. ‘In reality, a corpse’s skin withers
& contracts, causing the fingernails to only appear longer. Hair also.’
The Prof’s voice, as he spoke, was full of unnatural emphasis, like a
teacher trying to get a classroom of idiots to enunciate. Fin-ger-na-ils. It made
Němec feel like an idiot just listening to it. He ogled the ghost blatantly, with
his mouth half-open like someone who’d forgotten their lines & was waiting for
a prompt —
‘Fingernails…? But aren’t you…?’
‘Oh sure,’ the Prof yawned, ‘I’m the wits of former days.’
The ghost got creakily up on his feet & put the knife away, brushing snow
from his pants. Coughed. Straightened. Arched his spine. He might’ve been
some old homeless guy taking a stab at morning callisthenics, thumping his
chest optimistically, pulling his elbows back, doing a bit of a softshoe shuffle.
Sidling across, the ghost peered into Němec’s face with an expression vaguely
quixotic, then winked —
‘But what about you, mein Freund, mmm?’
Němec stood dumbly. Perhaps he expected subtitles to put him wise. The
* If a man can be said to own his own ghost. [:]
1
dead horse made unsympathetic eyes.
‘Don’t you at least have something to say for yourself?’ the Prof chuckled.
Němec avoided the horse’s dead stare. He scratched his neck pensively,
but nothing came to mind. His shoulders made a helpless shrugging movement
inside his dark suit jacket.
‘Well then,’ the Prof pursed his lips, ‘so much for the story. Aren’t you
even curious as to why you’re here?’
Němec gave it some thought. “Why” seemed too abstract. “How,” on the
other hand. But he had no idea how he’d got there either, only vague impressions
that possibly existed merely to fill the blankness. A window. Wind tunnelling in
his ears. A falling. But that was all. Maybe, at long last, he’d got the green light
from Head Office to jump. Make a bold new start. All that. But the premise, the
ground… Perhaps he wasn’t here at all. Perhaps there was no “here.”
The Prof meanwhile yawned, fanning his mouth with a woollen glove.
Strange to say, he didn’t look like a ghost. But what was a ghost supposed to look
like? There were things you heard about but never actually saw. Cold War
spooks, subversives, foreign agents, for example. Spectral crossborder numbers-
stations broadcasting on the ether. Silhouettes erased from misty TV pictures.
The disappeared & never quite rehabilitated, never quite resurrected. Concocted
futures of greater things to come. Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa, etc. Well,
what was a ghost after all, but a conspiracy to defraud the senses? A
flibbertigibbet? Smoke-in-your-eyes? House of Hammer meets Material
Dialectics?
Němec blinked. As for the Prof? He seemed altogether too corporeal to
be an hallucination. Or the opposite, maybe: a wispy nothingness of methane &
carbon dioxide lingering in the wake of the Old Man’s dear departed
composthumous body, given to assume visible form, faculty of speech, all the
standard accoutrements. Like an ignis fatuus in a cartoon freezeframe with
backing vocals.
The fingernails on the other hand…
The Whole
The whole thing would obviously have been a bad dream if not for the fact that
he was sure he was awake. Němec picked his nose & inspected the end of his
finger. A length of nose-hair lay kinked under a glistening film like a fly’s leg in
aspic. He wiped it on his jacket & stared down at his shoes, then at the Prof’s
shoes. Brown suède. Not much good for getting around in this weather. But the
2
Prof was dead, the horse was dead, the whole of Golem City may as well’ve been
dead too & him with it for all the difference it would’ve made to his choice of
footware. Careful what you wish for, kiddo. It brought to mind pictures of rooms
stacked ceiling-high with confiscated shoes. Maybe somewhere, he mused, there
were rooms like that for dead cities like there were mortuaries for dead people.
Perhaps this was one & he’d slipped in through a side door by accident. The
ghost frowned as if he could read Němec’s thoughts —
‘Bah! So now what? I’m supposed to go puff like a cloud of smoke?’
The Prof waved his arms, bugged his eyes out. Not quite round but folded
down at the edges & at the same time stitched up under the eyebrows. Like
Peter Lorre in Secret Agent — the “hairless Mexican” look the Old Man always
gave him whenever in the past Němec had managed to come out with some
particularly novel conception. That, for example, the world was controlled by
androids. The recollection made him blush, though at the time he’d been
positive about the androids. Even so, deny it as he might, the present situation
was clearly getting out of hand. Brushing the Prof aside, he went over to the
dead horse & with sudden determination kicked it in the mouth. A row of
yellowed teeth gleamed out at him like bits of polished tesserae. The horse didn’t
even blink. Němec gave it another kick to be sure & stubbed his toes in the
process. The grey horsehead was frozen solid as a curbstone.
‘Bravo!’ the Prof said, clapping him on the back. ‘I was beginning to worry
you weren’t the man I took you for.’
‘Christ almighty!’ Němec winced.
The ghost stood beside him as if admiring a piece of his own handiwork.
‘You know what they say,’ the Prof grinned, ‘about gift-horses?’
‘What the hell is all this, comedy hour?’
‘All what, mein Freund?’
Němec cast a despairing sideways glance. He’d never noticed before that
the Old Man was missing an earlobe, but he noticed now.
‘You’ve got no ear,’ said Němec, unable to help himself.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. How else could I hear what idiotisch things keep
coming out of your mouth?’
The Prof shook his head in disgust & turned away. The glow from a
streetlamp caught in the grey stubble that covered his chin, casting a faint one
o’clock shadow.
‘Idiotisch!’ he repeated.
