The Combinations, page 4
made believe the whole City was like that, abandoned in the face of some cosmic
catastrophe, the Doom of Time, the End of the World, the Haemorrhage of
Dialectical Reason. He imagined being the last human alive, tracing his name
with bony fingertip on fogged glass, like a message to a future he scarcely dared
believe in — letter-by-awkward-letter, holding his breath, then exhaling, erasing
whichever went before, while outside a rusty streetsign creaked in the wind
beneath the lone streetlamp.
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One Night
One night the shadow of a man emerged slowly from the dark into the cone of
the streetlamp. Then another. The first was tall & thin as a scarecrow, the
second was short & fat. Each was wrapped in a dark trenchcoat. Němec watched
them from the window, struggling up the street with a battered saloon piano
between them that kept sliding on the ice. Every couple of feet the men paused,
cursing & heaving as the piano inched backwards. Němec tried not to breathe,
afraid the figures would vanish behind the fogged glass & never return.
For long minutes the men dragged & shoved. Their actions, though
awkward & strange, appeared full of purpose, yet there was nowhere they could
go. Beyond the streetlamp, the dull grey edifice of Hotel K____ presented an
insurmountable barrier. There they stopped. The scarecrow held steady while
the other withdrew a pair of cobblestones from his coat pockets & wedged them
under the piano’s wheels. Brushing-off gloves, they each stood back to survey
their handiwork. Almost immediately a silent argument ensued: hands
gesticulated, then fists, then the argument became a game. Paper, scissors, rock.
The short one spat in disgust, got down on all-fours in front of the piano &
waited. The scarecrow, carefully arranging the tails of his trenchcoat behind
him, seated himself on his companion’s back, lifted the lid from the keyboard,
disencumbered himself of his gloves & began to play.
Allegro ma non tanto.
Beneath the scarecrow’s fingers the black & ivory keys of the piano
gleamed. Re-fa-mi-re-do-re-mi-re. Now sharply, now dully, marred or married by
the inconstant wind, the notes became a queer music full of sweetness &
pleasure. Then snow began to fall & went on falling, & through the smudged
glass the two figures at the piano dissolved into it.
Later Němec experienced a nightmare unlike any he’d ever had before &
woke up with his tongue stuck in his throat. In it, he was trapped inside the grey
hotel, trying to find a way out. There were corridor after corridor of locked
doors. On every floor the same thing. It seemed to go on forever, running from
end to end of the hotel with no way out. Then, at the head of a long flight of
stairs, what light? A window! He rushed headlong up the staircase towards it,
but no matter how fast he ran the window remained stubbornly out of reach. All
of a sudden, the two trenchcoats were hot at his heels, hauling the piano on their
shoulders. Step-for-step, dexter & sinister, they came — bulging foreheads, gog-
eyed, sinewed jaws knotted with strain. Like some creature of paradox, he was
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caught between the unobtainable & the unrelenting. Less petrified, he might’ve
recognised this allegory for what it was. But at that moment all hope was lost:
the stairs he was climbing turned to enormous piano keys, rising & falling in
gross undulations, octave upon octave:
Dun-dun-dun!
Dahda-da-dahda-dahda!
Dun-dun-dun!
Dadah-dadah-da!
Da!
Down he went, beneath the millwheel of his pursuers’ feet. But then, just as
precipitously, the dream turned into its opposite. Němec found himself alone,
lying in bed, neither asleep nor awake. Two men in white boilersuits
materialised on either side of him. They had no faces, no eyes, no mouths. As
they wound the bedsheets around his body, they whispered, Liszt, Liszt, oh
Liszt! Without warning he felt himself hoisted shoulder-high & carried pall-
bearer-fashion across the room. The noise of a window being forced open. Then
a rush of cold air & the sickening thrill of weightlessness. Through ice & snow,
beneath the bitumen & cobblestones, down under the earth, he fell — fell & fell
towards that black hole at the core of everything. And still that mad music,
turning like a scratched record through the eye of God’s needle.
The Worms
The worms were burrowing around him through dark emulsions, disgorging &
digesting. It was a darkness more complete than any memory of darkness.
Němec lay there listening. Someone hit thè` button & the worms burrowed
through the soundbarrier into lightspeed. Then everything went still. For a
moment he thought he was back in the infirmary at the Children’s Home, that
the nurse in her starched pinafore & white cap was leaning over him with a faint
scent of rubbing alcohol. A tiny flashlight seemed to shine first into his left eye
& then into his right. An indistinct face, as if seen from the underside of a sheet
of ice, looked down at him. Then the light slid away & the stillness returned.
And somewhere inside the stillness, the familiar sensation of falling again.
There was nothing left to throw up. What there had been was already
smeared across his shoes. He was huddled in a doorway, staring at his hands. He
couldn’t feel them. Something was beating on the other side of the door. Fear
propelled him onto his feet, down the steps & along the path. The beating
followed him. Idiot. He stopped, breathed slowly so as to slow the blood in his
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ears. The cold burned, his teeth ached, a piercing wind-gust stung his face.
Memory kicked in. Somehow he was back where he’d begun. There, across the
street, was the same lamppost as before, the same snowbank, but no ghost, no
dead horse. Němec coughed, there was a taste of blood in his mouth. He spat as
if needing to visualise what he already knew. In the lamplight black spots
appeared on the snow. The fear caught up with him again & he staggered out
onto the street. The greyness opened before him, making a tunnel through the
gloom. Squinting into it, he tried to get his bearings, to conjure a map of former
escapes, but it was no good. The grey was unrelenting & the tunnel barely had a
flicker at the end of it.
Was the particular God who created this place expecting him? Perhaps he’d
arrived at the wrong time? Němec glanced back past the lamppost, half-hoping…
But no, the scene with the Children’s Home was already dissolving in the
greyness. The street behind him led nowhere. The path ahead might lead to
anything. He stopped & the greyness stopped with him. He walked on & the
greyness advanced. Vague façades loomed & receded. Empty shadows blew
beneath hallucinatory arcades, across dead-end intersections. Had he been offered
alternatives he might’ve let chance take its course, but the tunnel led inexorably in
one direction only.
Eventually it brought him to a ruined tramshelter, like a cave hollowed
out of the snow. No-one waited there. A signpost with illegible numbers rose
beside it like a future-primitive totempole or a paradox left cunningly
abandoned. From here an unexpected vista opened out. There was a square with
streets running into it, past buildings that sloped steeply away. Over the
rooftops, the spires of St Vitus rose at an inscrutable angle, like an axis of the
turning world, of invisible night-sky zodiacs. Němec steered towards them.
No sooner had he embarked on this new course than footprints appeared
up ahead in the snow. He wasn’t the sole survivor in this Apocalypse after all!
Whoever had left the tracks might even know a way out. Some way. Němec
trudged on after them, the road growing ever steeper. It was the struggle of the
little guy against adversity, the marathon to be run against the clock, the
mountain to be overcome — sound-up on the Wide World of Sports theme,
softly in the background. Before very long the set of tracks he was following
became two. Then three. They seemed to multiply in the eye into a whole
confraternity, intersecting & branching, winding & cutting back, vanishing
down alleyways only to reappear farther off, unexpectedly. Němec failed to read
their meaning. It was like walking around inside an overly elaborate riddle —
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the kind of riddle designed to conceal a solution that was either too obvious or
didn’t exist. Finally the paths, grown confused in a blind choreography,
separated & never found each other again. Where were the people who’d made
them? What lost tribe? Němec searched above the rooftops for the spires of St
Vitus, to see if he’d gained ground, but they hadn’t budged.
It might’ve gone on like that, endless-hours-on-end, past milestones,
boundary signs, a plough, an animal hide cut in thongs, a ditch — yellow dog-
stains marking canine territories — three-pronged blackbird tracks — a squirrel’s
hole: clues to the tenacious perseverance of species other than that to which even
Němec felt a reluctant kinship — camouflaged, huddled in subsurface
microclimates, hollowed tree trunks, eaves, gutters, abandoned attics. But
everything that begins has an end.
Like Shackleton
Like Shackleton, trudging for days & weeks with raw bloodied feet towards some
unobtainable pole. The scenery, the general layout of the district, resolutely
unerring. Snowdrifts, invisible leylines of hidden crevasses, the involuted burrows,
the migratory backalleys of cat & rat, the Escheresque staircase, the twisting river
of fissured ice — many moons — old-man-beard midway to navel — grey leather
horseface, creased & furrowed — ghostsledges & ghostdogs, howling & groaning
— the wind, the unrelenting blizzard — eyes glassed-over, measuring the
vanishing point of a mystic potentiality — some selfenclosed gelid orbit of Time
outside all chronology, meridian lines & randomness. A drink might’ve helped,
but no-one was offering. Some vocation you’ve got lined up for yourself. Whose bright
idea was that? As if stranded in the middle of a kaleidoscope — the more Němec
turned, the more everything resembled everything else, till all the images blurred
behind the falling snow & static invaded the picture, from above & from all sides.
Snow in his eyes mouth ears, Němec staggered, one foot in front of the
other, numb to the point of not knowing if he was even moving forward
anymore or if the whole thing was being run on conked-out conveyorbelts, a
cardboard scenery by fits & starts. St Vitus, his Mount of Purgatory, seemed
only to be getting further away. There were bridges, empty parks, railway lines,
boat horns echoing in a distance calculated to sound fake. As fake as all the
corbels, trefoils, lancets, spandrels, voussoirs, vergeboards, chevrons, crockets,
mouchettes, buttresses, clerestories, balustres, architraves, cupolas of this
Potemkin village his mind seemed determined to erect at every turn. As fake as a
city made of playing cards & balsawood, scraps of newsprint, papier-mâché,
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celluloid & déjà vu, bits & pieces of wrecked signage glued together, with
nothing behind them but empty space. Stageprops.
‘None of it’s REAL!’ Němec howled, coming at last to the point all this
must secretly have been leading to from the very start.
But by now he was standing in front of the door to his own apartment
building. How’d he manage that? The door was tilted slightly to one side.
Everything, in fact, was tilted slightly to one side. Němec swayed on his feet,
ankle-deep in pavement muck. The old homing-beacon still working after all,
eh? He groped through pockets for a key but came up emptyhanded. Nothing to
do but stare at the ends of his fingers — nails, crescent moons — der Mond am
Nagel dunkel bleibt… Had they grown? A voice interrupted these speculations —
‘Looking for anything in particular?’
From behind him came the sound of snow gritting underfoot. Němec
turned to find the Prof’s ghost standing in the middle of the sidewalk,
snowflakes clinging to his hair, coat collar, crumpled threadbare lapel.
‘A nice cosy place to put your feet up, maybe?’
The ghost’s creased forehead & sinuous jaw swam in & out of focus. As
usual the Prof was grinning. Ghoulmouthed, Němec thought. A hoarse whisper
snuck out through clenched teeth, like a faucet when the water mains have been
shut-off —
‘You’re not real either!’
The Prof scratched at the stubble on his chin.
Well d’you believe in ghosts, kiddo, or don’t you?
‘Ich glaube,’ the ghost said smilingly. ‘Aber, Ich glaube auch nicht. To
believe, as a certain philosopher once said, is also not to believe. Maybe you’re not real. Ever consider of that?’
One, the Prof’s grin seemed to say , would imply the other, nicht wahr?
‘Besides,’ he added, ‘I’m not the one dreaming all this.’
And as he said it, he pointed at something lying at Němec’s feet. It looked
like a body, all crumpled up on itself. Němec blinked. He couldn’t remember it
being there before. Another one of the ghost’s conjuring tricks. The body had
snow folded around it like a dirty eiderdown. Němec peered. The face, he
thought, looked horribly familiar.
Atavism
Atavism, Němec explained to himself, trying to be helpful, was the name of a
primitive impulse to repeat — the vicious circle inscribed deep down in the
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forgotten part of the brain, in the axolotl sub-mind — which, through the dark
ages of prehistory, had compelled evolution-wise the Tribe & his particular
selfhood to this current impasse: an impasse you might liken to a broken
amplifier at the end of a metaphoric telegraph line & a message trying to make
itself heard down the eons from that first feeble gulping of air out of the
evolutionary swamp to the shriek of some self-professed birdman lobbing
himself from a high tower convinced he can fly. A fish casting off its gills, a man
with wings: idiocies persistent enough to become the prime movers of Reason
itself. But if you wanted to fly, you built an aeroplane instead of diving out a
fifth-storey window debating the fine-points of gravity.
Under any other circumstances, the fact that he himself was lying on the
pavement outside his apartment building’s front door might’ve been funny.
Funny or not, a weird sense of déjà vu crept in. Yes, yes, it seemed to say, you’ve
been here before, too. Been a real trip down Memory Lane tonight, hasn’t it? This
other Němec reminded him of the dead horse, the way he/it was stretched out
there with blank eyes staring back at him, & the Prof waiting to see his reaction,
the skin around the Old Man’s mouth taut in stifled amusement.
Němec came closer to get a better look at himself crumpled there on the
ground, long enough for the joke to get stale around the edges. The Prof came
over beside him and took a look as well, peering from under furrowed brows like
someone observing a beetle on its back, wondering why the hell it didn’t just
turn itself over & get on with it. After a while the ghost cleared his throat —
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s one way to do it.’
‘Do what?’ Němec winced. ‘Besides, where’d you pop up from anyway?’
The Prof stifled a yawn —
‘Aber mein liebes Kind, I’ve been here all the time…’
Němec couldn’t help feeling there was something wrong with the whole
arrangement. The point, he thought. What was the point? Perhaps he was
supposed to do something, kick himself in the teeth to see if he was real, attempt
resuscitation, pretend he didn’t exist. Who? Him or me? He felt the Prof’s hand
squeeze his shoulder.
‘Don’t take it so hard,’ the ghost said. ‘There’ll always be next time.’
‘…?’
The Prof let his hand drop and straightened his coat, breath hanging in
the cold air. Němec shivered.
‘You know,’ the ghost said, dabbing at the sagging corners of his mouth
with a woollen glove, ‘there was a showman once, Mongo-the-Magnificent, so-
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appellated — ever hear of him? No? Before your time I s’pose.’
Němec glanced sideways at the Prof, who was still gazing down at the
shape on the pavement, no trace of humour left in his expression. It made
Němec feel suddenly very tired. He wanted to laugh, to break the moment’s
strange solemnity, but only managed a wheezing cough.
