The Combinations, page 46
Warning:
* Uh-oh. [:]
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c NEMOC! c*
He ogled the parcel with a sense of foreboding/presentiment/apprehension.
Frankly, Němec couldn’t think of any good reason why such a thing
should turn up on his doorstep at all. Far as he knew, the people at the Golem
City Teaching Hospital weren’t making hand deliveries that year. Like maybe
they’d kept part of his brain that got chopped out while he was under
anaesthesia & figured he might want it for a keepsake, hehe. He shook the
parcel. Didn’t feel like sloshy brain matter, more like a book. Maybe the
Bugman thought he needed some reading matter to expand his mind a bit, hoho,
figured he’d appreciate the little joke with his name. Or, scary thought, perhaps
there wasn’t a reason for it at all, but chance had dictated it? One day something
falls from the sky, or is born backwards, or turns up on a doorstep, unexpected &
undesired — an infant in a reed basket, a wrong augury, a parcel of ill-omen.
The gifthorse’s proverbial.
‘Next thing,’ Němec told himself, ‘you’ll expect me to show gratitude.’
Inside the apartment he switched on the recordplayer & went to work
brewing some coffee. Stravinsky’s Pétrouchka scratched away in the background.
The milk he’d opened the day before was already soured, so he drank his Sierra
Maestra black, too lazy to go across the street again. He left the parcel on the
kitchenette counter & shuffled across to his armchair, shifted the typewriter out
of it & eased down, sipped the coffee & winced — it took four sugar cubes to
even begin to make it drinkable. He couldn’t figure how people did it to
themselves. Masochists.
Němec sat there nursing his cup of poison, listening to Stravinsky slowly
fade out into the sound of the walls breathing, wondering what the hell to do
with the rest of the day or the rest of his life. He thought about Blecha wanting
his ashes scattered up there on the roof. On his magic mountain. You reach the
end of the climb, then what? Take in the view for the remainder of your days
while the boredom settles in & eventually, with the right kind of positive
outlook, you might even grow indifferent enough to find peace, satori & all that.
Have to keep an eye on yourself, though, at such a rarefied altitude, not to let all
that pure oxygen go to the brain. Well there’s always someone watchin’ kiddo, even
if it’s just that bug they put in the back of yer brain. Like being spied on by your
own shadow. What good’s a conscience with a poked-out eye, eh? Or if not a
* This just gets better & better. [:]
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shadow, a rock even, a blade of astroturf, inanimate things programmed to
intercept your innermost thoughts, the ones you don’t even know anything
about. Just to help keep you centred in yourself.
Like Blecha sweeping his lawn, saying —
‘There’s this feeling you never get away from. Even now. Right at this
instant. As if some eyeball-in-the-sky’s zoomed in on you. Can’t say why. I’m
nothin’ to anyone. For forty years I was nothin’ to anyone & still they had their
gizmos watchin’ ’n’ listenin’-in. Microscopes up yer arse, microphones in yer
tooth fillings, hehe. Kind of comforting after a while that someone out there
cares so much. Makes you wonder what they see, what they hear. Must be real
exciting stuff, eh? Reckon they’d get sick of it after a while. Or maybe it’s the
other way, man grows fond of the things he watches over, given enough time.
Like that sentimental fucker in the sky, must shed a tear or two, eh, with all the
carnage going on all over the place. Give His little Adam a tickle in the ribs
every once in a while, just to let him know He’s still up there. A sneaky little
Christmas present, if he’s been behaving himself, all wrapped in tinfoil & glitter.
Watch the poor jerk tryin’ to guess who the secret benefactor is…’
BALLAD OF THE PIGEON MAN
Day after day all alone in the park
He talked to the birds till long after dark,
Feeding them breadcrumbs & morsels of stuff
Till those clubfooted vermin had had quite enough.
Now they couldn’t fly off when he stomped on their heads
And carried them home to munch on in bed…
Speaking of benefactors… Němec blinked at the sheet of paper stuck in his
typewriter. Sipped bitter coffee. Pondered. Maybe it could run to a whole series:
the Ballad of Viktor Faktor, the Ballad of the Moustachioed Dwarf, the Ballad
of the Bugman… He wound a fresh page in. Emptied his cup, cauterising
whatever tastebuds he had left. Wiped his hand across his mouth & laughed —
‘Not exactly the old wordsoul, eh? The kernel. Whatever. The beheld
creation. Wonder what the Prof’d make of that. Ballad of the Pigeon Man,
indeed. Twaddle, mein Freund. Well that’s what the world’s made of, ain’t it?’
Němec realised he was talking to himself & stopped. No future in that.
Better to put it down on paper. Some of that deathless prose he sometimes
dreamt about, the sort of thing he’d imagine himself writing if he was
Dostoevsky, perhaps, or Hrabal, though both of them were dead, if for different
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reasons. Perhaps, yes, in a different world, he might’ve been one of them.
Somewhere, in some parallel universe, in a place a little bit like this one but
where everything turned out different. The same, but different:
Where he hadn’t been born under this particular constellation of Absurdity.
Where all you had to do to make a future was think of one (always the
optimist, eh?).
Where life wasn’t a joke you played on yourself to stop from going mad
with boredom or grief (touching, that).
Where there was no conspiracy to turn a man into a bug under a
microscope (unlikely).
Where history was just a catalogue of yesterdays & not this appalling
compulsion to repeat (no chance).
Where there were no secret police, no psychiatrists & no skeletons in the
closet (hahaha).
Where amnesia didn’t go begging & beggars didn’t need to.
Where a fair rate of return meant always being able to find your way home.
Where a second chance didn’t come with a mortgage attached.
Where the last man standing was the first in line.
Where a song of sixpence could be got for free.
Where trees grew on money & horses only drank whiskey, no matter
where you led them.
Where mistaken identity was the only type.
Where a man named Joe Stalin was a flower-seller on the Piazza d’Espagna.
Where Patton hadn’t stopped for a pint at Plzeň.
Where Churchill never once smoked a cigar.
Where Hitler was a one-armed trapeze artist.
Where Mao Zedong wrote sonnets in the Petrarchan style.
Where Jesus H. Christ was a vegetarian.
Where Salomé was a saint & Saint Teresa modelled for Modigliani.
Where Heinrich Himmler was a Galeries Lafontaine windowdresser.
Where Oppenheimer broke the bank at Monte Carlo.
Where Mata Hari married Rasputin & gave birth to the Marx Brothers.
Where Zacco & Vanzetti played Waltzing Matilda.
Where Charlie Mordecai was a younger brother & Freddy Engels was a
Baťa salesclerk’s bit on the side.
Where Adam Smith was a Quaker & ate oats every morning for breakfast.
Where a man named Herzl was a part-time bicycle thief, a black&white
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minstrel & a sometimes portrait painter on Charles Bridge.
Where Franz Kafka held down a dayjob at Golem City Prudential.
Where Richard Wagner played banjo with abandon.
Where the Twentieth Century was a glass of warm milk before bedtime &
not that nightmare of cosmic indigestion, gastric reflux & unstomachable bile…
Was that the worst they could do? Now that the century was fizzling out,
the world coming to its millenarian doom, what last hoorah would they cook up?
What ballad of brainless bullshit would they stamp on the collective sub-cortex
now at the end of days & for all eternity? Mene, mene, what did you dream? Sweet
naked little nothings… all in a row. Being gleefully sodomised by a famous TV
personality. God’s nob, man! What’re you playing at? Well, the world’s still young, eh,
still plenty more where those came from. Němec poked idly at the typewriter keys,
the first thing(s) that came to mind:
The Man in the Moon is a milky maggot,
a sliver of snot, a circle of slime,
a jet of jism in the sty of your eye,
a clot of cream on a mouldy pie,
a hooknosed Zhid, a pimply Pope,
a peckerwood’s piles playing rope-a-dope,
the rancid puss from a swollen zit
on Moh’mmed’s mummy’s mildewed tit,
a Zulu’s eye, an elephant’s egg,
the gloryhole in a deadman’s head,
an idiot’s grin, a murderer’s smile,
the empty stare of a faceless dial,
a police cell lamp, a dentist’s clamp,
the pockmarked arse of a two-bit tramp,
a plaster of Paris virgin for sale,
a syphilis stench under a perfumed veil,
a crystal ball full of murky light,
a lunatic’s howl in the dead of night…
Disgusted (with himself, with everything), Němec pushed the machine aside &
got up to stretch his legs, scratch his arse, pick his ears, take a well-earned rest after
such strenuous literary toil. On the way to the kitchenette he reset the needle on
the recordplayer. Stravinsky redux. Turned it down low, where the music verged
on intuition. He was emptying the stale coffee grounds in the bin when he
remembered the parcel. It was still where he’d left it,* like a piece of bad luck. He
poured himself a fresh cup of ulcer-inducing char roast, picked up the parcel, &
crossed to the door to take a look through the peephole. Did he expect someone to
* It hadn’t grown legs & run away of anything like that, in case you were wondering. [:]
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be lurking out there? One of Faktor’s mad monks? Retreating to his armchair he
stood the parcel on the table. Sipped. Pondered. At least the second cup didn’t
taste as rough as the first, it must’ve been growing on him, so to speak.
And when didn’t curiosity got the better in the end. With stumps of
chewed fingernails, Němec unpicked the knotted packing string. Strange how he
could never remember actually chewing them, they just always seemed that way,
as if something chewed them for him in his sleep. His pet anxieties lining up at
the head of the bed, taking turns. Would they keep doing it when he was dead?
He tore open the wrapping paper — inside was a thick folio bound in leather the
colour of charcoal. The binding was cracked, the paper swollen, as if it’d been
left for a long time in a damp place. The spine was split down both sides,
coverboards upcurling, fore-edges flymottled. Němec turned the book over — it
looked the same from both sides. Great, just what he’d always wanted. Why
couldn’t someone’ve slipped him a million bucks in brown wrapping-paper
instead? Well who knows, he thought, maybe the jackpot’s inside.
Before he had a chance to take a looksee, a scrap of thick handmade paper
fell out of the book & onto the floor. There was some writing on it. Němec leant
over the side of the chair to pick it up & tried reading what it said. The ink was
scratchy. Seek not that which is hid. Or it might’ve been, Salt nuts had [something]
his kid. “Altered,” maybe. Like that made a fucking lot of sense. A very
encouraging beginning. He turned the paper over — there was more on the
other side, scribbled in the same faded blue ink. It was like one of Volta’s
prescriptions, penned with all the clarity of churned riverwater, turning Moldau
into Vltava, a rainslashed sky into angel wires, a reflection blown sideways on a
preternatural windgust. Ježíšku! Elihu! And so on. And so forth. It took some
deciphering. What it appeared to say could only have been intended as a joke:
I have painstakingly set about to examine
the scriptura anew in a full and free spirit
and admit nothing as its teaching which
I was not taught by it clearly.
Němec tossed the paper aside & opened the book at random. He flipped
through what he supposed to be some kind of ledger or memex: lists of names,
numbers, symbols, the odd diagram, bits of scribble, all in the same faded blue.
The pages ended in a stiff flyleaf with a green & black engraving pasted on it.
The engraving depicted a young Carmelite kneeling at a prayer bench beneath
an altar to the Sacred Heart. Her habit was in some disarray. Her posture was an
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ecstasy of contradictions, at once supplicating & convulsed.
The detail of the etching was superb. The noviciate’s hands were clenched
so violently that the fingernails of one hand visibly pierced the flesh on the back of
the other. Above her upturned face, the saviour’s left & right ventricles radiated
with white intensity. Black blood streamed down the altar, spreading outward in a
grotesque chiaroscuro. All the while a winged Devil with cloven hooves, dildo
extended, was poised to bestride the hapless Carmelite — & she, sinking, falling,
thrilling at the point of the dart with which Divine Love is about to pierce her.
Appended to these two graven figures was a monogram embossed on a
black chess-piece knight, gothic in design, so intricately entwined as almost to be
illegible. Němec studied it for some time before a pair of letters spelled
themselves out to him:
T.H.
He spoke the letters quietly to myself. What was T.H. supposed to be? He put
the book down & sipped his coffee, cold by now already. T.H. eh? Mmm. As in
a certain Doctor of Letters, Emeritus Prof, currently residing at no other known
abode than a slot in a cemetery wall? Any other candidates for T.H.? None
Němec knew. Good enough. Tomáš Hájek Q.E.D. it’d have to be then. Which
still didn’t explain what the book had been doing on his doorstep, or did it?
(Well, in a manner of speaking, it’d have to, wouldn’t it twinkle toes?) And if it
was, knowing what the Old Man was like, what kind of “book” was it?* The
secret Polygraphia, his skeleton key to the Sphinx’s Code? The little theremin in
the back of Němec’s head made faint music…
He shut the book on the Devil & the Carmelite & opened it again
somewhere in the middle. Across the left hand page a lot of gibberish in the
familiar blue tracery (a rt gh h m eno hd pan ori tgg shi nqs g a)
interspersed with even less comprehensible doodlings. On the facing page,
columns filled with names, numbers, hieroglyphs. He peered closely, each of the
names had been crossed-out, like checklist, a closed account: Dedecius,
Dědeček, Dedeič, Dedek, Dědek, Děděk, Dedera, Dědic, Dědič, Dědíček,
Dědičík, Dedich, Dedík, Dědina, Dedinek… No-one he knew. He flipped
through a dozen or so more pages: Klein, Klekner, Klement, Klemm,
* D’you buy this crap? [:]
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Klemperer, Klempík, Klemšov, Klenotník, Kleprlík, Klíč, Kleprnák, Kleprnek,
Kleprník… Same story, none of the names meant anything to him. Nothing for
Nemoc, either (haha), though there was a Nemčko, a Nemčok & a Nemec (no
discernible háček on the “e”).
The remaining pages were more or less the same: lines & columns.
Turned sideways, the lines became cascades: a Japanese waterfall. Inverted: a
trellis threaded with vines. On one of them, in a corner, three rows of oriental-
looking calligraphy. Beneath which, a piece of cod “haiku”:
A sign and no road —
Winter night polestar shining
on unknown waters.
Impossible to tell if it was meant to be poetry or some sort of riddle, or just one
of those rare masterpieces in doggerel you heard rumours of but never expected
to actually come across in the short span of your own lifetime. A sign and no road.
Sounded about right. Something which points in the direction of a place, or a
thing, or an idea, but not the path required to get to it. Ah-ha. All been there,
eh? Unknown waters. Winter night polestar shining. Very deep. The genius of late
Sunday night programming. Well, Němec thought, you put stuff like this out
there in the world & sooner or later it’d be bound to find its admirers. What the
great struggle for democracy was all about…
