Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 111
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
He relit his pipe and had a glass of schnapps. Peering into his own glass, Tom saw a rainbow whorl supported on the clear fluid. He tossed it back, and his eyes swirled with the spectrum. The buttery flames of the oil lamps smeared, then righted. Tom felt keenly the massive void of the desert surrounding them, a cloud chamber, thousands miles wide, across which trailed Von Sasser’s vaporous fancies.
‘Well, we – the people, that is’ – he smiled sharkishly – ‘have always desired a more perfect union, justice for ourselves, if not our blacker conspecifics. Domestic harmony, mutual defence, common welfare – the blessing of liberty – for now, and for posterity! These are ringing phrases, deffo, but smokescreens all the same.’ The scalpel came out again, and he operated on the smoky carcinoma that metastasized from moment to moment.
All but one of the waitresses had joined the women slumped against the wall. Apart from Tom and Prentice, the Anglos were drowsing. During the meal Tom had heard his lawyer’s deranged chattering orbiting the room. Swai-Phillips’s voice fell from the rafters, flew in through the windows, was even thrown up from beneath the floor: ‘He tells it like it is, yeah. He says what he knows, right. Time to lissen up, you bloody buggeraters! Time to foooo-cuss!’ But at last he had crept in and huddled together with the tribeswomen.
Von Sasser resumed. ‘The more tenderly ambitious the commonwealth in the domestic sphere, the more rapacious its foreign adventuring: the standard of Rome speared in the barbarian heart, Cromwell’s mailed fist punched through the Irish kidney, the Belgian neutralists who still run amok here. Who decides what shall be ordained “the good”? Why, those who have the power – we’ve always known that.
‘ “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away, even that which he hath.” The colonized have been taught to turn cheek after cheek, while receiving slap after slap.’
Von Sasser stopped, and Tom wondered where all this was going. Could it be aimed at Prentice, who sat across the table, his face, even in the lamplight, as pale and flat as paper? If so, was it the preamble to even rougher justice than Tom himself had contemplated? The waitress poured him yet another shot, and he injected it into the carburettor of his mouth, where it exploded. Tom gagged, spluttered, headlights bore down on him – from inside his eyes.
Ignoring this, Von Sasser continued: ‘Of course, times change, and, rather than admit that he wants to rip off your bauxite, the white man’s burden has become the Coke can he made from it, which you’re too inconsiderately bloody poor to buy off him. And in their own despotisms of dull, the Anglos abuse their wrinklies, their sickies, their dole bludgers, with a conception of “the good” that reeks of formaldehyde and the morgue. Their utilitarianism – how I bloody despise it! The noble Athenian polis rebuilt – on the never-never – in a general medical ward. Socrates is denied his hemlock and put on a morphine pump – as if that were any kind of death!’
The dirndl rustled by Tom’s ear; the shot was poured. Before drinking it Tom had the temerity to interrupt the anthropologist: ‘Excuse me, uh, Herr Doktor, but what exactly is in this stuff? It tastes kinda funny.’
‘A drop of petrol,’ Von Sasser told him. ‘Only a drop, mind. The desert tribes sniff it, and drink it – it’s a bloody scourge. I insist on all my guests having a little themselves. As a medical man I can assure you that it’ll do you no harm.’
A medical man? Tom was preparing to probe Von Sasser on this, when the anthropologist changed tack: ‘When my father arrived here fifty years ago, he found these people’ – he gestured towards the bundled-up tribeswomen – ‘on the brink of extinction. Winthrop . . . Gloria, Vishtar – they’ve heard this tale many times before . . .’ And besides, Tom thought, they’re beyond hearing.
They were: the fastidious Consul had slumped forward on to the table, while both Gloria and Loman were tipped back in their chairs. Gloria’s didgeridoo snores were a droning accompaniment to her cousin’s continuing jibber: ‘He’s the man, yeah, the number-one big bloke. Hear him!’
‘. . . but I think it’s important for newcomers to know the background to what we do here.
‘As I say, my father came here as a young anthropologist. He had studied with Mauss, with Lévi-Strauss – he was eager to get into the field and make a name for himself. In those days, well’ – Von Sasser dismissed a genie of smoke with a wave – ‘the authorities in Capital City had no more shame than they do now. He easily obtained a permit to work among the desert people. Then, when he arrived – in a convoy of bloody Land Rovers! All heavily laden with canvas tents, picks, shovels, all the gear and supplies he needed for six months in the wilderness! Y’know’ – he leaned forward, digging at Tom with his pipe stem – ‘anthropology itself has always been a kind of imperialism: the noble conquest of authenticity . . . Yes, when he arrived, instead of a state-of-bloody-nature, he discovered that the Belgians had long since rounded up all the able-bodied men, women and even children they could find and put ’em to work in Eyre’s Pit. You’ve seen the pit, yeah?’
‘We, uh, swung by on our way here,’ Tom said. ‘It’s . . . I dunno . . . terrifying–’
‘Terrifying, exactly! And that’s now, when there’s mechanization, and Anglo miners are also down there. Then, well, hundreds – thousands – were dying every bloody month. They were being forced, at gunpoint, to dig out the ore with their bare-bloody-hands.
‘The mining company had shot all the game – there was nothing for the people to eat. An entire generation – maybe two – had already been decimated. The guvvie encouraged this genocide, cynically offering so-called “development grants” for every native inducted into the certain death of the mine. There were no human-rights monitors in those days, Mr Brodzinski. None of the voyeuristic gear of an international community, which in our own era sees fit to come and see such atrocity exhibitions.
‘No, this was the heart of darkness, all right. And my father found out that the indigenous people, most of all, had forgotten its anatomy. The tribal groups – if they’d ever existed to begin with – had been broken up. Isolated mobs of old men and women, and young children, roamed the bled searching for water, feeding on each other’s corpses when they fell.
‘These people had bugger-all. Nothing. No language but a debased Anglo pidgin, no identity except as concentration camp inmates or escapees. They had no songs, no dances, no myths, no cosmology – not even the most rudimentary creation myths, such as are found among remote islanders. There were no rituals or holy men and women, no leaders – or taboos. These benighted people had only engwegge – and death.’
Von Sasser lapsed into silence and relit his pipe. The drawing of the match flame into the high ceramic bowl cast crazy highlights on Prentice’s black button eyes – for he sat in a trance. The other Anglos snored, Swai-Phillips muttered, the Tayswengo squelched their nicotine cuds.
At length, Tom ventured: ‘So, uh, if you don’t mind my asking, what did your father do?’
‘A good question, Mr Brodzinski. I’ll tell you what my papa did.’ The anthropologist’s tone softened still more, to a didactic caress: ‘He taught them, that’s what he did. He distilled all of his study of other traditional peoples, all of their myths and songs and dances, into a new and viable belief system for these terminally deracinated souls. He devised an entire new vocabulary for them, then grafted this on to the stump that remained where their own language had been amputated. Then he taught this to them as well. Of course, such instruction would’ve been impossible for a mere rabble, so Papa gave birth to new kinship systems, while inculcating them with the beginnings of a hierarchy.
‘This was true bloody fieldwork: meticulous, slow, painstaking – every step of the way profoundly engaged. My papa was something that was rare enough in the world in those days, and has now totally disappeared: a heroic man – maybe a superman. He had all the skills he needed. He could hunt, he was a crack shot, he could doctor, speak fluent Homeric Greek, and his embroidery was indistinguishable – to an expert – from that of the most refined Viennese seamstresses. He did the dirndls. Even so, this undertaking tested him to his limits – yet he persisted, for year after year.
‘It took him twenty to educate a core group of the natives – the mob that still live here, with me. He called them the Intwennyforteemob, for he planned ahead, Papa, way ahead. By 2040 he hoped – believed – that this entire land would be under the sway of these new–old traditions. If I’m able to continue the noble work he started for that long, well,’ the anthropologist sighed, ‘perhaps it will.
‘By the time I was finishing school in Bavaria, the process of wider dissemination was under way. From here, emissaries went out to the north and the west. Attracted by these proud pioneers, the tribes now known as the Inssessitti, the Aval and the Entreati coalesced.
‘My mother . . .’ Von Sasser’s voice stretched, then twanged with emotion. ‘Fair Elise.’ His fingers played a few notes on smoky keys. ‘She was a woman of uncommon intelligence – the most refined sensibilities. She supported Papa to the hilt. Not for her the bloody whingeing that women indulge in today, with their drivel about “sexual fulfilment” and “my career”, making of their menfolk handmaidens with penises!
‘I don’t think my parents spent more than three months together in their entire marriage – which lasted over forty years. She understood the enormous significance of her work, she knew her feelings were of no consequence at all, while the knowledge that somewhere, over here, out in the desert, a young girl – or boy – was being infibulated, was fulfilment enough. When Papa sent her instructions, my mother followed them to the letter.
‘He decided that I should go to uni, first to read anthropology, while my brother, Hippolyte, came straight out here to law school in Capital City. If either of us had nurtured any other ambitions – to play at poetry or rebellion, travel the world, perhaps – then we made of them mere arrière-pensées. By our late teens we already knew our destinies: Hippolyte was to become my father’s secret agent, working within the very law itself to undermine the Anglos’ hegemony; while I was to join Papa here, once I’d completed my medical training, then qualified as a surgeon.’
‘A surgeon?’ Tom seized on this inconsistency. ‘I thought you said you’d studied anthropology.’
‘First with the anthropology!’ Von Sasser snapped. ‘Then, next, the medicine. Papa had two vital tasks for me – I was, you no doubt realise, the favoured son. First, I was to infiltrate his bold creative synthesis into the relevant academic journals. Those impoverished dullards!’ he laughed. ‘With their mania for systemization, the ceaseless recycling of mental trash they call knowledge!
‘I agitated these people on my father’s behalf to obtain the necessary peer evaluations. In due course the academic papers appeared that eventually were assembled and published as Songs of the Tayswengo.’
‘But . . . you . . .’ Tom ventured timorously, ‘you, like, made it up?’
‘Mr Brodzinski – Tom – there was no likeness whatsoever. But then, haven’t the sages of the West also, like, made it up? With their World Spirits, their noble savages, their categorical-bloody-imperatives? Isn’t what passes for the epitome of Western knowledge no less creative – and, if I may be forgiven a little pride – far less well written than the tales Papa and I spun?
‘Ours, Tom, was an instrumental morality, not the “will” of a delusory sky god. Papa – he took the long view. In the subsequent years our literary endeavours enabled Hippolyte to campaign for native customary law to be incorporated into the Anglos’ civil and penal codes, thus ensuring us – the desert tribes – with a steady stream of income.’
‘You mean – my $10,000?’
‘Precisely, Tom. It’s an elegant form of justice, you might say. Certainly more elegant than theirs, which is what? The crudest calculus of human existence – an abacus of beady little lives slid hither and thither by spiritual accountants.
‘What do they want, Tom? Why, you of all people should understand by now. Six billion? Nine? A hundred billion human apes soiling this already fouled little ball of a world – that’s their conception of the good. Is that what they – what you – want?’
This was not, Tom thought, a question that demanded an answer – least of all from him. His eyes smarted, and he could feel the oily residue of the last shot of schnapps slick in his gullet.
Now Von Sasser tilted his beak towards Prentice and hawked: ‘Then there’s the kiddies, eh, Prentice? We mustn’t forget them, must we?’
Prentice roused himself. The cigarette between his fingers had burned down. His waxy features had melted in the night-time heat. He was transfixed by Von Sasser, a feeble rodent pinioned by relentless talons. ‘Euch, no,’ he coughed, ‘we mustn’t forget them.’ Then he jerked upright and pushed his cigarette butt into the crowded ashtray.
A wild dog howled out in the desert, a cry that was taken up by others on all sides of the Tyrolean chalet. Tom thought: perhaps if I open the shutters there will be icing-sugar snow sparkling in the moonlight, a huddle of happy carollers under a cheery lantern. I fucked up in the dunes – but maybe he’s gonna give me a second chance?
‘The kiddies, yes . . .’ the anthropologist mused enigmatically, and set his long pipe down at last. ‘They bring us back to where we started.’ The hollow eyes sucked in Tom and Prentice’s tacit assent. ‘We are in complete agreement, then: morality is always an instrumental affair. For the Anglo governments those instruments are the survey, the bell curve, and the statistician with no more imagination than this plastic fork.’ He held it up and deftly snapped off a single tine. This then became a diminutive baton, with which he conducted his own final remarks.
‘I spent a further decade acquiring the necessary skills needed to facilitate Papa’s conception of the good.’ The little baton swung in the direction of the scalpel case. ‘He had reached an impasse. He had cultivated these people, right enough – yet he had failed to harvest them. They still remained passively in the path of the Anglo combines. What was needed were mystics, firebrands and charismatics who would galvanize the embryonic body politic! Papa – who had no formal medical, let alone surgical, training himself – was relying on me to provide them.’
Von Sasser flexed the spillikin between his slim surgeon’s fingers; with a scarcely audible ‘ping’, a bit snapped off and hit the Consul’s forehead, then dropped to the tabletop. Adams stirred, groaned, drool looping from his slack mouth.
‘And that, gentlemen, is enough for one night.’ Von Sasser scraped back his chair and rose. ‘We will resume our discussions tomorrow. Very good!’
Discussions, Tom thought, was hardly the right word.
The anthropologist strafed the natives slumped against the wall with the tracer phonemes of his father’s made-up language. They got up – penitent, monkish in their black togas – and filed out. Swai-Phillips brought up the rear with his jazzy plainsong – ‘Oh, yes! The man, OK, the man – he’s said it all, he’s done it all. He’s the big sharp ’un . . .’ which faded into the silvered negative of the starlit desert.
The Anglos’ exodus was a more awkward affair. Perversely, Adams, Loman and Gloria all chose to behave as if they had been lapping up their host’s every word. They took their time to say their grateful goodbyes, praising Von Sasser’s food, his drink, his conversation. But when they stumped across the veranda and stumbled down the steps, their sleep-cramped legs betrayed them.
Tom and Prentice followed on behind.
‘Until the morning, then.’ Von Sasser bade them goodnight from the top of the stairs. ‘There are some things I’d like the two of you, in particular, to see, yeah.’
Tom went to his swag in the classroom of the abandoned school, musing on how it was that, for so long as he was lecturing, Von Sasser’s accent was located in the Northern Hemisphere; yet as soon as he ceased, the squawking indigenous vowels came home to roost.
As he undressed, Tom admired the scissoring of his lean heat-tempered limbs. He slid into the canvas pouch and was soon asleep.
In the night, first one of his twins and then the second crawled in with him. Tom buried his face in their downy little backs. Later on, more disturbingly, Dixie joined them. Tom had to manouevre a twin in between them, lest he inadvertently press his groin against her thigh. Finally, shortly before dawn, Tommy Junior came into the classroom. ‘Where are you, Dad?’ he called out in the anaemic light. ‘Where are you?’
Tom wanted to respond to his adoptive son, but he was encumbered by the fleshy straitjacket of his own flesh. He could see Tommy Junior plainly enough, but the boy wasn’t helping himself. He refused – or was unable – to remove the hand-held games console from right in front of his eyes, so he bumped into the desks and collided with the walls.
He persisted, though: ‘Where are you, Dad? Where are you?’ His own wanderings in the maze of furniture replicated those of the tiny avatars on the screen he was fixated by.
Dixie, the succubus, rolled over and grasped Tom’s thigh between her own legs. It was she who had the impressive morning erection: a pestle that she ground into him. He screamed, but there was a rock rolled across his mouth, and the cry echoed only in the cave of his skull.
Between sleep and waking, paralysis and flight, myth and the prosaic, the existential and the universal, Tom watched, horrified, as Tommy Junior at last found a way through. He flopped forward on to the swag, and his adoptive siblings splattered into nothing. Now, there was only the overgrown cuckoo child bearing down on Tom, crushing the life out of him.
Tom ungummed his swollen lids. Gloria Swai-Phillips was sitting in a chair by the window. She wore a cotton dressing gown patterned with parrots, and her hair was wet from the shower. The sunlight flared on its damp sheen, but her face was deep in shadow.
