The Combinations, page 85
the Gods & Goddesses.*
Out on the landfill, Němec felt the paradox of an open space that seemed
to collapse inwards, hemmed on all sides by an advancing black fog, feeling his
way along the path, tuned to the dull frequencies of footfall on gravel, glass,
needle, mud, echoes telescoping through space, eye of ear. At its lowest point he
struggled to keep his bearings, one wrong turn could’ve upset everything. Away
from the path, the landfill subsided into marsh, a wide crater below the mist,
weirdly luminous, the dragon’s breath — somewhere out there in the privets,
witches’ covens, dreadlocked, smacked up to the eyeballs, dreaming weird shapes
out of the ether. Something rattled its chain, groaned, ground its teeth, snored.
* And what if, like the pyramids of Egypt, the Voynich Manuscript belonged to another world?
Some medieval UFO abduction? The wonders of untold knowledge & customs most foreign, most
strange? Distant cosmologies, as presented themselves to the semi-literate, pre-Industrial Mind?
Like G.O.D. dictating to a jilted man, alone in a tent in the middle of a desert, the Sacred
Scriptures, the Divine Truth: a man with no more inkling of infinity than he did the existence of
capitalism, kangaroos, or the computer chip. [:]
548
On the far side the path ran dead into a concrete cistern, one wall caved-in. A
flight of stairs wound down into brackish water.
Time in its Fluidity
The river had flowed there till just before the War, when they buried it with
rubble, from Rohan Island to Libeň, & let it lie there under the weeds like a
sump collecting the dregs of progress. It was out in the middle of the dead river
that Němec stood, watching the horizon disintegrate behind the sídliště,
detached silhouettes above an encroaching mist. The weather had turned yet
again. The sun was nothing but a pale disk behind the clouds. The grey waters
of the Vltava coiling back upon themselves like a withered fallopian. Soon the
rain would make perfunctory business of it all. The towerblocks across the
isthmus of Holešovice — the chimneystacks of Karlín — the drydocks &
junkyards of Libeňský Island — the pervitin factories of Palmovka tenements &
grey cliffs of Bohnice above them, walling the City like a puzzle-cube
compulsively rearranging itself.
The whole landscape looked to Němec as ridiculous as a disassembled
stage set with a busted dry-ice machine belching from the wings — but if you
closed your eyes, you could just about picture it as it might’ve been, flickering
out there over that giant dumping ground like an ignis fatuus, the dream-
foretold, the Ville Radieuse, the kernel of a future vastly different from this one,
Heydrich’s private Heliopolis come to life like a golem risen from mud &
cardboard, & fused in the fiery forge of five hundred B-s.* As upon such
foundations, before the astonished witness of all the unnamed factory workers
long ago buried there, the monoliths that Time & dollars must one day
transmute to glittering glass condominiums, the proverbial angel-rapers of this
New Babylon-in-Waiting. Amen.
But not in your lifetime, kiddo.
Well, he’d been brought up to be an optimist, he’d had the best teachers
in the world, what else was a man like Němec to think?
Wading up onto dry land through the long reeds, moiré tunnels of
wiremesh, winding, doubling back, plastic bags flapping in spectral breezes, the
distant croaking & wheezing of trams over Libeňský Bridge — out into air, wet,
saturated… Time in its fluidity, the yellow orb of a clockface floating above the mist,
* Well, kiddo, if I said it once, I said it a thousand times, sure does pay to have friends in this world. [:]
549
rising at your back, star of Bethlehem, world slipping on its axis forever eastwards,
casting vague shadows ahead, the river so close now you can hear it. A sea of used car
lots, windscreens grey in the morning light — the path becoming a road,
tending right, past a Gotham cop car TO SERVE & PROTECT jacked-up on
wooden crates, weeds poking through the engine block…* And what the fuck was
that doing there? Across the road stood a kiosk with a canvas awning running
along one side & handpainted cardboard sign that said DOCTOR
* The Amerikan Dream not all it was cooked-up to be? These little reminders of the Eternal
Optimists of ’ with their fait accompli Revolution orchestrated from elsewhere, as once before
Berlin, the Moscow communiqué, Glasnost & Perestroika — & not that pulp romance, Ancien
Régime vs the Will of the Proles, see the little man take a bold stand against tyranny and oppression —
as seen on TV — a tale told for every midget crawling out from under the proverbial hillock,
hump & holdall to go sun himself by, in the glow of his newly discovered righteousness, Party card
stuffed way down in hip pocket of ubiquitous rip-off Levis, wig hanging down, etc. Historians
might well’ve christened it the Cucumber Revolution, on account of all the decent law-abiding
types holed-up during the belated “hot” days of November on their quarter-acreages, stuffing
themselves with pickled okurky till the situation cooled down. The Berlin Wall was nothing but
rubble by the time the first protests began — the anniversary of Jan Opletal, medical student, shot
by the Nazis during the Protektorat. Then things got surreal. On Národní the riot squads play-
acted at beating a student to death — one agent-provocateur by name of Ludvík Zifčák, covered in
fake blood. (Well who the hell was Ludvík Zifčák anyway?) The stage managers of this penny
arcade gave the dissidents their fifteen minutes then ushered them back off into the wings, served
up a couple of scapegoats, put Havel in the trophy cabinet up on the hill, & — handydandy —
what the Free World Club call’s democretinisation. And so the Golem City newsclowns chased
each other’s tails like a pack of sun-struck mutts. All of a sudden, everywhere you looked were
born-again antiestablishment types, lifetime dissidents, professional protest marchers, pennyante
freethinkers, the whole Conscience of the Nation rattling their house-keys in lockstep under the
nose of Saint Wenzelsplatz’s flyblown horse. They sucked down the atmosphere, beat their
breasts, flagellated their flags. They demanded freedom, elections, rock’n’roll. They chanted
spontaneous slogans someone in an office had spent a long night sweating over: DEMOKRACII!
SVOBODU! JAKEŠE DO KOŠE! HAVEL NA HRAD! The words came tumbling down
around their ears like manna from Hradchin. They drank & were merry — then drank some more.
And straightaway everything was amnesiafied. Well, kiddo, if you can’t get what you want you can
always fake it. Which was how it seemed, alright, perhaps how it’d always seemed, for anyone with
eyes & half a brain wired to them: some bummed-out alchemist’s fandango of the mind — an
Arcimboldo with DTs — greengrey — rotten-pithed — mouldy — fingers worming about in
constant agitation — hunch-backed over a weak flame — crusted spoon & wad of cotton at the
needle-end of a crusty glass syringe — eyeballing his fix. Something cooked-up like a piece of
Xanadu with coloured lights on painted stage props — smoke & mirrors, tinsel & glitter &
cellophane — the mind’s kaleidoscope. One day they pick you off the street & give you the
gladhand, the sugared pill, the limelights & the big hit, all velvetsmooth, milk&honeyish, & just as soon you’re left high & dry on the thin edge of a oneway comedown. But what did Němec care?
Revolution or no revolution, any kind of diversionary tactic would’ve done — a broken window, a
playground rumble, a murder in the street, a hundredyear flood: A skiff ploughs the main square; a
fish defiles a shrine. The stuff of poetry. [:]
550
HORRIBILIS. There was nothing inviting about it, but Němec wasn’t exactly
overwhelmed with alternatives so he humped his sack of bones across the road &
surrendered himself to circumstance.
Under the awning was a couple of plastic tables, faded pin-ups taped to
the wall, TV on a stool, charcoal stove, bags of cement piled waist-high making
a kind of perimeter. Němec ordered a coffee through a perforated sheet of
perspex that hung over the counter. Plus a brandy to wash down a couple of pills
& then another. The shadow behind the perspex made voluble snotsucking
noises while it poured: warm tapwater straight over coffee grounds, a bottle with
no label into glass opaque with thumbprints. It was the kind of joint your old
school of taxi drivers drank their breakfast in, hanging onto the TV with their
eyes to keep awake till their shift ended or began. There were a couple of them
there now. Němec squeezed behind them & perched on a cement bag while his
drink lasted to take in the entertainment.
It was priceless stuff. Playing on the screen was some s Jess Franco
ketchup-fest: young Asian slavegirl in the clutches of a fanatically evil Nazi, full
v rig-out, Hitler-saluting guards, the works.* Cue the obligatory concentration
camp rape scene: wire-frame bed sans mattress, trusses & stays & a wall rack
showing off the Blond Beast’s collection of riding crops, horse whips, cat-o-nine-
tails. Němec sipped his brandy while the evil Nazi recited race-hatred ideology at
the slavegirl. The scene cut. The Nazi had her by the hair now — with his free
hand, tearing away her flimsy attire — flash of brown nipple — crotch stubble
— the Nazi pawing her, salacious.
Then (it happened all very suddenly, too suddenly for Němec to get a
handle on) the slavegirl somehow worked her hands free while the Nazi gnawed
at the inside of her thighs, driving bloodied fingernails into the sadistic
scumbag’s eyeballs. Screen static. Snotsucking from behind the counter. Then
cut to slavegirl, mouth a horrible grimace, kicking the now prostrate Nazi
repeatedly in his leather-thonged gonads. More screen static. Close-up of the
slavegirl’s hands clamping the Nazi’s jaw as bile pours from his nose,
commingling with the blood drizzling from mangled eyesockets — hands flaying
about as the Nazi chokes on his own vomit — & all the while, the slavegirl,
silent, not a word spoken…
* What’s with this whole Nazi shtick anyway? [:]
551
�
The tram driver poked an iron bar into Němec’s ribs till he woke up, then sent
him staggering & blinking out into the light. This one looked exactly the way
every other terminus looked, like a scale-replica of nowhere — only someone’d
had the extraordinary presence of mind to stick a sign up that said ĎÁBLICE,
so everyone could share in the joke. Bottom of the hole, end of the line. Němec,
barely able to suppress his sense of fucking hilarity, crouched under the
tramshelter out of the wind & rain, though he couldn’t tell in fact if it really was
raining, or if a wind was blowing, or if the weather was only in his head. It
looked bleak either way. Well ain’t that just peachy, Němec, you sonofanothing?
It must’ve been a Sunday, whole sermons could’ve been preached in the
time between rides.* When it finally got going, the took him south back
towards the river, right back where he’d started, through gypsy tenement
squalor, coal smoke, gridlocked morning traffic, street vendors hawking watches,
belts, women’s polyester underwear, bootleg video tapes, CDs, broken furniture,
third- & fourth-hand magazines — past sexshops, brothels, electrical repairs,
clothes racks, fruitsellers, tobacconists, liquor merchants, wreckers yards,
Africans hawking fake leather, gypsy women with babies huddled beside
mountains of overflowing trash, ancient homeless men begging with foreheads
pressed to wet pavement, old blind couple with accordion playing out of tune,
one squeezing, one pressing the keys & buttons like Siamese twins —
commuters, shiftworkers, drifters, junkies, crazies, bums & no-hopers… In
short, the whole symphony of the Golem City underbelly, groaning & shrieking
in EL. Then a sharp righthand detour through the highlights of some diligently
preserved offset bombing range left over from the War.*
The day in all its vagary unspooled like montage, crisscrossing the City
* But would Truth prevail? [:]
* The USAF pounded the whole district flat on a weekend in March of , two whole months
before The End. It wasn’t their least achievement by any stretch. They missed the ČKD Works
but managed to snuff workers & their families sitting down to Sunday lunch. The month
before, the score was , Valentine’s Day in a residential district of No Strategic Importance, a
love letter from Uncle Sam made of tonnes of incendiary. Nearly a hundred apartment blocks
deleted from the map that day. Eat yer heart out, Lucky Luciano. Sort of thing made Lidice look
like pennyante stuff. If Heydrich was such a Big Cheese, why’d they settle for so few? Maybe the
brass back in Berlin didn’t love the guy so much after all. Now there’s a thought. [:]
552
southwest & northeast, from depot to endstop, nodding-off & nodding-on,
through snuffed-out landscapes that were all too familiar, returning always to the
river as if to a crossroads. As the day progressed, the weather closed in:
discontinuities accumulating like celluloid, voiceovers, ghosts in the machine,
faces on sidewalks, in shop windows, cars, framed in grey light, in rain, in
silhouette. A thousand doppelgängers, rubber masks, identikit mugshot with
eyes blacked-out, crossed-out, scraped-out, billboard faces selling untold visions
of future paradise, prostitutes in suits, in fancy dress costume, in uniform always
with a product to sell. NEW PERSIL™ CLEANS BUILT-UP CRIME. And
everywhere bleeding out from the underside, secret messages in graffiti code,
viral DNA, backwards alchemistry spelling the Great Silent Undoing like pirate
broadcasts from the Collective Submind sketched large in cartooned spirals of
doom. It was like some future war zone in a movie about a past no-one could
remember, & that no-one would ever make:
A continuous tracking shot. The river, a barge, a bridge. Fires, collapsing
buildings, a flatbed truck stacked with dismembered store mannequins. Just as
any movement may be characterized by flows & turbulence, so too the camera’s
journey through this allegory of desolation. But Němec never doubted himself to
be anywhere other than in the wrong place at the wrong time. Right at that
instant, perhaps, in some parallel dimension fifty years ago.* If you blink, the
moment inspired him to think , the whole world just might end yet still go on. Like
* How to write it, unconstrained by a history of “facts”? An alterior account, so to speak, of what
prevails behind & beyond that melodrama of buffoons & madmen — of a laughter that freezes the
lymph & wrings the entrails, & the unquenched ardour of a love all too aware of itself — avatars
outside a world where stupidity has always been relied upon to gain the upper hand — some triple-
distilled essence of humanity on its way to a never accomplished destiny, because there is none.
Who could be the contestants in such an anti-drama? What faceless entities — gnostic
protagonists whose existence is as universally indeterminate as it is spurious, if only because we’re
unable to disprove them? Like those apothecurial forces of chaos & occulted order, Š.V.E.J.K. &
T.E.S.L.A. — phantoms of paradox, secret agents of History & its counter-histories, enemies &
enigmatics of the Grand Narrative — the one upsetting the airwaves, the other going under the
radar, residing in the margin of error, the standard deviation, manifest solely in the gross
coincidence, the palpable lie, the bald truth. How else to write it than by keeping on the move,
avoiding the stasis of a declared position, the seductions of certainty? To write with his feet,
stepping on the cracks, between the verifiable & verisimilitude, staying one step ahead of his own
hypotheses — like some mad dog (where had it gone to?), looking over its shoulder at him or just
the world in general at its back, the leash that’ll forever be somewhere in mind — knowing that in
any case all the routes have already been marked out, only the combinations left open to chance,
indeterminacy, feint & bluff. Knowing, too, there’s nothing to be gained by indefinitely doubling
the stakes (like shooting craps with the Devil, where what’s in play is never more than another roll
of the dice — in other words, everything). � Chapter . [:]
