The Combinations, page 97
Progress that never speaks their language for long* — each tribe up there
convinced the next lot are complete lunatics. I mean, what the hell’d
Tutankhamen have to say to Socrates? Or Stalin to Saint Paul? “Nice day for it,
mate.” ( Fucking weirdo.)’
‘Will this take long?’
‘…?’
‘Just because I missed my afternoon nap. At my age, you know…’
Even now the Prof’s ghost seemed to be fading. As if all Němec’s idiotische
talk had left him quite literally worn out. Perhaps he’d’ve benefited from a more
rarefied atmosphere. It was the ghost’s turn to yawn. Němec got an unobstructed
view of the Old Man’s demonological dentures, bridgework in the Gothic style.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I was thinking about you just the other day…’
‘Oh?’
* Noc for nox & nic for nemoc? [:]
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The ghost gave Němec the kind of look you’d expect from a complete
stranger confronted by evidence of a shameful sentimentality. Somewhere the
Mahler started up again.
‘Where’ve you been all this time, anyway?’
‘I was never anywhere else, mein Freund.’
‘…?’
The Prof’s ghost waved a hand at the pages lying scattered on the floor.
The Polygraph, the mutilated Blaq Book, the Farkakte Facsimile —
‘What d’you expect to find in all of that?’ the ghost said.
Němec didn’t really know what to answer. The “key,” perhaps. But the
key to what? What kind of key? What key? It was all very Zen — a riddle that
pointed only to the possibility of its asking, & the oracular voice in which it was
asked. An echo, so to speak, of the personality within the page, the ghost in the
machine, the mind in the Manuscript. The Prof’s ghost chuckled —
‘I know what you’re thinking. And if the words could speak? If what spoke
were the words themselves?’
He gave Němec a sly grin & shook his head —
‘Good luck to you…’
‘You mean it’s got nothing to do with…?’
The ghost pursed his lips thoughtfully —
‘I can tell you this much,’ he said. ‘Right now I’m as close to being at
peace with myself as I could ever’ve expected to be…’
The ghost cast his gaze around the room, then back at Němec —
‘Did I find what I was seeking, you want to ask? The question is, what
was I seeking? What’re you seeking, my young friend?’
‘…?’
‘Consider this,’ the ghost made gestures with his hands, fingernail
semaphore, vague emphases tending to vaguer legerdemain. ‘Once you accept the
premise, you’re already halfway there.’
‘…?’
‘You know, when I was your age,’ the ghost said, ‘I never dreamt it’d be
like this. The world should’ve ended by now. Does that count?’
The ghost stuck his hands in his jacket pockets. Němec wondered how
long he’d been waiting there, in the ether so to speak, since the last time,
watching him make a fool of himself. Like some sort of TV signal you just
needed the right antenna to tune in on. And why’d the ghost been sitting on the
bed while he’d been sleeping on the floor? He caught an echo of something —
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‘Halfway where?’ he said.
‘Eh?’
‘You’re already halfway where?’
‘What’re you talking about?’
‘You said, just a minute ago…’
‘What the hell am I supposed to care what I said a minute ago? You’ve got
to stay in the present, haven’t you learned anything?’
‘There’s no way to win, is there?’
‘Win what?’
‘My thoughts precisely.’
Němec, in corpore, was crouched because neither sitting, lying nor
standing — a purely intermediate state. And not, despite appearances, the
posture of one absorbed in that mirror of the soul made up of unreal figures,
hieroglyphs, enumerations, the purgatorial Polygraphia he’d condemned himself
to in mock volition.* Was he awake? The ghost gave him another one of those
“hairless Mexican” looks.
‘Don’t,’ Němec said.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t tell me I’m imagining things.’
The room & everything in it seemed wrong now, out of kilter.
‘Fine by me,’ said the ghost, ‘only thing is, how d’you know you’re not?’
‘What the hell difference would it make?’
‘Ah, that’s the spirit. Just as I was saying…’
The music meanwhile, having resumed, progressed by stages of
sympathetic boredom: the feigned anguish, the appeal to mercy or at least
reprieve, the unerringly erratic sentiment of a voice calmly articulating its own
confusion. You had to give the Prof credit for the staging at least. If it’d been left
to Němec… Ham actors in bedsheets belabouring pseudo-Shakesbawdian.
Smoke, ectoplasm, convex mirrors. Etc.
The ghost leant forward on his knees & made an anecdotal grimace. He
* Conscious perhaps only of a prevailing inadequacy, the minor chord that announces remorse at
the absence of magic, whose fainter picture, the once luminous skein, inadequately conceals the
return of the perpetual migraine — nothing to sweeten the bitter caffeine that sluggishly cognises
you, the unhappily obedient companion, practicing your childish spell (but to’ve failed without
making the effort were hardly onerous) hopeful of a sudden magnanimous intervention — to
unriddle you, release you from this bondage back into the sleep you’ve been accustomed to,
resembling not so much a prisoner desperately scratching at the surface of the inner eye, as an
embarrassed supplicant doffing his hat for change to passersby… [:]
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seemed to peer at Němec as if the air had thickened, grown dense, gravid,
substanceless vision clotted by nescient ethers —
‘But I suppose you want me to say something serious? A bit of gravity
from beyond the grave, eh?’
The ghost raised its eyebrows. They hung down somewhat on the sides.
Like little waterfalls in stop-animation. Němec pictured diminutive elves
frolicking at the edge of the water, gossamer butterflies…
‘Well here it is, then. There’s a secret communion, between knowing &
seeing, life & death. What it is, though, is impossible to say.’
‘…?’
‘You know, the Far Eastern masters, whom History accounts as being
terribly wise — for whom space was a theatre of metamorphosis & who
considered time as the crossroads where a vast number of highways come
together — preferred among all the substances of nature those which are the
most intentional & which belong therefore to the most obscure arts…’
God-on-High covering his tracks, strewing riddles of indeterminacy in the
path of the overly inquisitive? A man must serve his intelligence only, so said. Like
the deadman’s Polygraph. But even the Almighty couldn’t resist fiddling the
evidence, if only to prove to Himself that He exists?
‘On the other hand, these same Masters, while working with the
substances of art, undertook to stamp the traits of nature upon them. Genetic
engineers of a previous age. And thus, by a simple inversion, nature for them was
full of works of art & art was full of natural curiosities.’
Did he really say all that? Speaking in riddles again.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘this’s important. The illumination of reality must find its
path through the unreality of signs & make of that un reality a new order of
re ality.’
The ghost chuckled. The unpleasant laughter of the vocational non-entity,
so to speak. A rasping approximation of the lost pulmonary reflex —
‘You’re the writer — at least that much should make sense, mmm?’
And there he was, fading again. His hands & the woollen jacket had
began to dissolve — the disembodied tabernacle of himself dissenting to airy
facticity — soon his face alone remained, as though suspended in the middle of
the room. Němec gawked. Like an embalmed head, he thought, staring back at
him from a non-existent mirror. And when it spoke, a babbling of ulterior
worlds already come to an end? Votary of obscure cults waiting for the sky to fall.
Something between a stone idol with colostomy bag & a mental avatar that
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neither eats, shits nor dies (again), because its existence in the first place is
nothing but a false prolepsis. Ah, yes, all that to look forward to in the Sunset Views
Retirement Home of all Eternity, eh, kiddo?
As the ghost’s features gradually merged into the masonry, Němec
thought of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. He felt ambivalent about
watching the Prof go. Probably just needs to switch off the lights, recharge the
battery. You could poke the air where he’d been sitting & make a hole in some
parallel dimension, like a Pythagorean joke. And they’d still be there watching you,
the surveillance boys upstairs who never sleep. No rest for the wicked, hehe.
‘Remember one thing,’ the ghost said.
The words hung in the gloom like motes floating in the air. The Prof’s
ghosthead wasn’t grinning at him any more. In fact, it wasn’t there at all. Němec
fixed his attention on the voice, which’d detached itself somehow & was in the
room like an independent entity. Alice meets Obi-Wan. It was a lifeless,
hallucinatory voice — it seemed to come from everywhere in the room at once,
& nowhere.
‘Remember,’ the voice repeated, speaking from a great distance already,
‘the tree can’t be escaped by means of the tree.’
Day by day the nerve endings, contracting, deadening & hardening. If he kept
this up, Němec thought, in the end all there’d be left would be a desiccated
lump, a grey shrivelled thing, like an alchemist’s turd baked down to its essential
substance: the Man without Qualities, a bug rolling on the floor waving its legs.
He dragged upright. Brushed himself down. Unstiffened the joints. Stirred the
air in the room about. Ghostless. Over to the window: nothing to report out
there. Dug around in the record box. Voilà, Mahler’s unfinished business. He
flipped it on the recordplayer. Faint hiss. Evocations of absence. Ah. Faint
shivers up the proverbial. He stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets, hunching
into it, fingers encountering loose change, paperscraps, one of the Chink’s stale
fortune cookies, still there in its greasy torn wrapper:
Lucky number !
for H — for Hájek, hocuspocus & hooey.
Mystic th letter.
for sudden fortune, prosperity, the fullness of chance. Ah-ha.
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for all around, all sides, the eight vertices of time-space, octagonal, cube
of the soul, the spinorial chessboard.
The trigrammes & hexagrammes of the I-Ching.
for eternity, the House of Death, the stepped pyramid, Egyptian bā. The
Great Lisper’s ka’aba in Red Square: black mortuary suit doublebreasted &
polka-dot tie, glycerine-pickled, potassium acetate, alcohol.*
for oxygen, acid, enzymes & genesis.
for mandrake or man-dreck, meaning: know, recognise, be familiar with.
for the ramified power of influence, the diatonic scale, the Third Fold,
the th month, the last parrying position.
for right behind the eight-ball, kiddo.*
What the Prof’s ghost’d said about the “Eastern Masters”? The Man in
the Moon? Window dressing for sophistic solipsists? Why go to all the trouble
of putting in an appearance to tell him that — why not just use the telephone?
Oh hello, the old Geist here, fancy hearing some orientalised bullshit this evening?
(You’ve got no class, Němec.) Thinking about how a man clocks-out in his
bathtub with a chessboard between his knees & all the pieces bar one floating
around him & how it must’ve ended somewhere. What’d the last move been? And
what about the missing piece? An occultation of signs on a par with the mysteries
practiced within. When in reality there was no mystery, when there was nothing
within. Like an obsidian Sphinx. You break it open & all there is are more
obsidian Sphinxes, each Sphinx begetting another & another, you smash them,
pound them, grind them into dust, molecules, more & more of them, sub-
atomic Sphinxes, god-particle Sphinxes, Sphinxes all the way down.
He bit on the fortune cookie, but it was rock-hard stale, just as he knew
it’d be. Well what was he supposed to do now? Mahler rocked, Mahler soared,
Mahler digressed into hysterics, Mahler grew sombre, pensive. The room looked
at him expectantly. This’s pointless. He shoved his hands into his trousers. Look,
here in this pocket is a phial of little white pills, and in this pocket are the blue pills,
and in this pocket… How many goddamn pockets did he have? Don’t argue with
providence, kiddo, just roll with the punches. Right. Exactly what he needed, a bolt
of lightning up the arse, like shit off a shiny shovel, to shake him down to the
core of his whatsits.
‘Choose me!’ said the little white pill.
* C₂H₅OH. [:]
* See above. [:]
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Man in his finest hour. Even the prophets must’ve wanted an opt-out
clause. Holy Geist & all that. Telling himself with a strict eye, I shall not glance
back. Well, what didn’t God permit, at the end of the day? Emissaries of rarefied
nonsense, monsters of all quarters. As if invented in order to be accommodated
& not the other way round. What matter if the plot’s as adrift as you are? What’s the
world tethered to? They used to say, Why stab the jellyfish or cut the weeds? Němec
interpreted this as meaning, If you take one pill, take another two just to be sure.
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46
___________
THE WHITE WHALE
‘Did I ever tell you the one about the fakir who stuck his cock in his ear, all in
the name of wisdom and enlightenment? Sure I never told you that one?’
Merkin had been the regular barman at The White Whale for as long as
Němec’d been going there. '", ginger & with a face like a motorised
snowplough. He had a lanky Irishman collared at the bar, with a pint of
Guinness surrogate, giving him the intimate details of his life story. He’d talk
the legs off a stool, provided there was an audience sitting on it. The Paddy had
a buckskin cowboy jacket, with tassels on, & one of those Ned Kelly beards that
looked like they came straight out of a mail order catalogue, little hooks at the
top that go over your ears & a hole cut in the fuzz so you can breathe through it.
You knew he was a Paddy because it was the first thing that came out of his
mouth whenever he opened it. For all Němec could tell, the two were old mates
from way back, or they’d known each other five minutes.
Before the Revolution happened in ’, Merkin was a conscript on the
Kraut border near Hranice, armed with a pair of binoculars the dioptrics of
opera glasses, perched up in a linden tree on the lookout for NATO spyplanes.
Lockheed SR- “Blackbird”s, Lockheed U-S “Dragon Lady”s. Fat chance.
When he wasn’t flipping-off the GIs on the other side or birdwatching or
perving at the comrades from the women’s barracks, he spent his eighteen
months on the frontier getting pissed & reading comicbooks — Ranxerox,
Bongazine, The Great Švejk. After the Revolution happened they were left to
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fend for themselves. No rations in the mess hall, no petrol in the trucks. It was
fifty klicks through the snow to Cheb. They walked.
Merkin was an alright guy. In the past he’d let Němec run up a tab if
Němec hung around after closing time to stack chairs & listen to his opinions
about himself, but it’d been a while. Called Němec “Slim,” not from any
affection for the blues, but because it was what he called everyone. Like the
scene in that film with Slim Pickins riding an A-bomb rodeo-style out of the
belly of a B- & the music going We’ll meet again the way folks say when
they’ve only just met. Like callin’ a total stranger friend. Well how’s about it,
friend? Lend me that ten dollars? Pay you back next time…
On this particular occasion, Merkin being busy gabbing with Ned Kelly’s
brother & all, Němec forewent the customary pleasantries as he came down the
streetside steps & instead slouched over to a seat by the front window. Chances
were Merkin wouldn’t’ve recognised him either way, in his Charlie Chap get-up
& head all misaligned, & no-one remembered anything in this town after six
