Multi-column

V.

Summary

summary::

Thoughts

Highlights

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East Main, a ghetto for Drunken Sailors nobody knew what to Do With, sprang on your nerves with all the abruptness of a normal night’s dream turning to nightmare. 🔗

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“Man, I want to die, is all,” cried Ploy.
“Don’t you know,” said Dahoud, “that life is the most precious possession you have?”
“Ho, ho,” said Ploy through his tears. “Why?”
“Because,” said Dahoud, “without it, you’d be dead.”
“Oh,” said Ploy. He thought about this for a week. 🔗

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“Where we going,” Profane said. “The way we’re heading,” said Pig. “Move your ass.” 🔗

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“You’re all I have,” she warned him. “Be good to me.” They would sit around a table in Teflon’s kitchen: Pig Bodine and Dewey Gland facing them one each like partners at bridge, a vodka bottle in the middle. Nobody would talk except to argue about what they would mix the vodka with next when what they had ran out. That week they tried milk, canned vegetable soup, finally the juice from a dried-up piece of watermelon which was all Teflon had left in the refrigerator. Try to squeeze a watermelon into a small tumbler sometime when your reflexes are not so good. It is next to impossible. Picking the seeds out of the vodka proved also to be a problem, and resulted in a growing, mutual ill-will. 🔗

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Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself. It seemed he was always walking into one: turn a corner in the street, open a door to a weather-deck and there he’d be, in alien country. 🔗

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Could they hear that, can stomachs listen: no. And you never hear the one that gets you. 🔗

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Only the brave escape. Come Sunday nights, with golfing done, the Negro maids, having rectified the disorder of last night’s party, off to visit with relatives in Lawrence, and Ed Sullivan still hours away, the blood of this kingdom exit from their enormous homes, enter their automobiles and proceed to the business districts. There to divert themselves among seemingly endless vistas of butterfly shrimp and egg foo yung; Orientals bow, and smile, and flutter through summer’s twilight, and in their voices are the birds of summer. And with night’s fall comes a brief promenade in the street: the torso of the father solid and sure in its J. Press suit; the eyes of the daughters secret behind sunglasses rimmed in rhinestones. And as the jaguar has given its name to the mother’s car, so has it given its skin-pattern to the slacks which compass her sleek hips. Who could escape? Who could want to? 🔗

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(Inanimate objects could do what they wanted. Not what they wanted because things do not want; only men. But things do what they do, and this is why Profane was pissing at the sun.)
It went down; as if he’d extinguished it after all and continued on immortal, god of a darkened world. 🔗

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He never got beyond or behind the chatter about her world—one of objects coveted or valued, an atmosphere Profane couldn’t breathe. 🔗

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He felt like the Angel of Death, marking the doors of tomorrow’s victims in blood. 🔗

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surly 🔗

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He walked; walked, he thought sometimes, the aisles of a bright, gigantic supermarket, his only function to want. 🔗

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It wasn’t that he was tired or even notably uncoordinated. Only something that, being a schlemihl, he’d known for years: inanimate objects and he could not live in peace. 🔗

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Somehow it was all tied up with a story he’d heard once, about a boy born with a golden screw where his navel should have been. For twenty years he consults doctors and specialists all over the world, trying to get rid of this screw, and having no success. Finally, in Haiti, he runs into a voodoo doctor who gives him a foul-smelling potion. He drinks it, goes to sleep and has a dream. In this dream he finds himself on a street, lit by green lamps. Following the witch-man’s instructions, he takes two rights and a left from his point of origin, finds a tree growing by the seventh street light, hung all over with colored balloons. On the fourth limb from the top there is a red balloon; he breaks it and inside is a screwdriver with a yellow plastic handle. With the screwdriver he removes the screw from his stomach, and as soon as this happens he wakes from the dream. It is morning. He looks down toward his navel, the screw is gone. That twenty years’ curse is lifted at last. Delirious with joy, he leaps up out of bed, and his ass falls off.
To Profane, alone in the street, it would always seem maybe he was looking for something too to make the fact of his own disassembly plausible as that of any machine. It was always at this point that the fear started: here that it would turn into a nightmare. Because now, if he kept going down that street, not only his ass but also his arms, legs, sponge brain and clock of a heart must be left behind to litter the pavement, be scattered among manhole covers.
Was it home, the mercury-lit street? Was he returning like the elephant to his graveyard, to lie down and soon become ivory in whose bulk slept, latent, exquisite shapes of chessmen, backscratchers, hollow open-work Chinese spheres nested one inside the other?
This was all there was to dream; all there ever was: the Street. Soon he woke, having found no screwdriver, no key. 🔗

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chapter two
The Whole Sick
Crew 🔗

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chapter one
In which Benny Profane,
a schlemihl and
human yo-yo,
gets to
an apo-
cheir 🔗

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chapter two
The Whole Sick
Crew 🔗

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Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45 degrees, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the heart’s ticking (metronome’s music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp’s dance under the century’s own chandeliers. . . . 🔗

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triumvirate 🔗

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Paola’s handiwork, Paola Maijstral the third roommate. Who had also left a note on the table. “Winsome, Charisma, Fu, and I. V-Note, McClintic Sphere. Paola Maijstral.” Nothing but proper nouns. The girl lived proper nouns. Persons, places. No things. Had anyone told her about things? It seemed Rachel had had to do with nothing else. The main one now being Esther’s nose. 🔗

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No ticking: the clock was electric. Its minute hand could not be seen to move. But soon the hand passed twelve and began its course down the other side of the face; as if it had passed through the surface of a mirror, and had now to repeat in mirror-time what it had done on the side of real-time.
II
The party, as if it were inanimate after all, unwound like a clock’s mainspring toward the edges of the chocolate room, seeking some easing of its own tension, some equilibrium. 🔗

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You felt she’d done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths. Smoke seemed to be in her voice, in her movements; making her all the more substantial, more there, as if words, glances, small lewdnesses could only become baffled and brought to rest like smoke in her long hair; remain there useless till she released them, accidentally and unknowingly, with a toss of her head. 🔗

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croupier 🔗

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Whatever the reason, he began to discover that sleep was taking up time which could be spent active. His random movements before the war had given way to a great single movement from inertness to—if not vitality, then at least activity. Work, the chase—for it was V. he hunted—far from being a means to glorify God and one’s own godliness (as the Puritans believe) was for Stencil grim, joyless; a conscious acceptance of the unpleasant for no other reason than that V. was there to track down.
Finding her: what then? Only that what love there was to Stencil had become directed entirely inward, toward this acquired sense of animateness. Having found this he could hardly release it, it was too dear. To sustain it he had to hunt V.; but if he should find her, where else would there be to go but back into half-consciousness? He tried not to think, therefore, about any end to the search. Approach and avoid. 🔗

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pied-à-terre 🔗

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His other amusement was watching the TV. He’d devised an ingenious sleep-switch, receiving its signal from two electrodes placed on the inner skin of his forearm. When Fergus dropped below a certain level of awareness, the skin resistance increased over a preset value to operate the switch. Fergus thus became an extension of the TV set. 🔗

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Catatonic Expressionist 🔗

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The pattern would have been familiar—bohemian, creative, arty—except that it was even further removed from reality, Romanticism in its furthest decadence; being only an exhausted impersonation of poverty, rebellion and artistic “soul.” For it was the unhappy fact that most of them worked for a living and obtained the substance of their conversation from the pages of Time magazine and like publications.
Perhaps the only reason they survived, Stencil reasoned, was that they were not alone. God knew how many more there were with a hothouse sense of time, no knowledge of life, and at the mercy of Fortune. 🔗

#💡 Great chapter to practice pynchons style and form!

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Tonight she would kiss beneath his eyes, one by one, these sad circles. 🔗

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She knew instinctively: he will be fine as the fraternity boy just out of an Ivy League school who knows he will never stop being a fraternity boy as long as he lives. But who still feels he is missing something, and so hangs at the edges of the Whole Sick Crew. If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever have been a line, or even if there is a line at all. He will learn how to be a twinned man and will go on at the game, straddling until he splits up the crotch and in half from the prolonged tension, and then he will be destroyed. 🔗

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chapter three
In which Stencil, a
quick-change artist,
does eight imperson-
ations 🔗

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florid 🔗

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(How many times had they stood this way: dwarfed horizontal and vertical by any plaza or late-afternoon? Could an argument from design be predicated on that instant only, then the two must have been displaceable, like minor chess pieces, anywhere across Europe’s board. Both of a color though one hanging back diagonal in deference to his partner, both scanning any embassy’s parquetry for signs of some dimly sensed opposition—lover, meal-ticket, object of political assassination—any statue’s face for a reassurance of self-agency and perhaps, unhappily, self-humanity; might they be trying not to remember that each square in Europe, however you cut it, remains inanimate after all?) 🔗

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His attention was to stray to her now and again throughout the evening. It was pleasant amid all that glitter to have something to focus on. But she stood out. Her color—even her voice was lighter than the rest of her world, rising with the smoke to Yusef, whose hands were sticky with Chablis punch, mustache a sad tangle—he had a habit of unconsciously trimming the ends with his teeth. 🔗

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automata 🔗

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Waldetar, a highly religious man, had heard the story from his father and was inclined to take the common-sense view. If there is no telling what a drunken human will do, so much less a herd of drunken elephants. Why put it down to God’s intervention? There were enough instances of that in history, all regarded by Waldetar with terror and a sense of his own smallness: Noah’s warning of the Flood, the parting of the Red Sea, Lot’s escape from annihilated Sodom. Men, he felt, even perhaps Sephardim, are at the mercy of the earth and its seas. Whether a cataclysm is accident or design, they need a God to keep them from harm.
The storm and the earthquake have no mind. Soul cannot command no-soul. Only God can.
But elephants have souls. Anything that can get drunk, he reasoned, must have some soul. Perhaps this is all “soul” means. Events between soul and soul are not God’s direct province: they are under the influence either of Fortune, or of virtue. Fortune had saved the Jews in the Hippodrome. 🔗

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littoral 🔗

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where cinders came to lodge in pores beginning to widen under the stresses of some heart’s geology 🔗

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Mahdi 🔗

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Nothing was coming. Nothing was already here. 🔗

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Mountebank 🔗

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Damn men and their politics. Perhaps it was a kind of sex for them. Didn’t they even use the same word for what a man does to a woman and what a successful politician does to his unlucky opponent? 🔗

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leitmotif 🔗

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She rinsed and stacked the last plate. No. A stain. Back went the plate into the dishwater. Hanne scrubbed, then examined the plate again, tilting it toward the light. The stain was still there. Hardly visible. Roughly triangular, it extended from an apex near the center to a base an inch or so from the edge. A sort of brown color, outlines indistinct against the faded white of the plate’s surface. She tilted the plate another few degrees toward the light and the stain disappeared. Puzzled, she moved her head to look at it from another angle. The stain flickered twice in and out of existence. Hanne found that if she focused her eyes a little behind and off the edge of the plate the stain would remain fairly constant, though its shape had begun to change outline; now crescent, now trapezoid. Annoyed, she plunged the plate back into the water and searched among the kitchen gear under the sink for a stiffer brush.
Was the stain real? She didn’t like its color. The color of her headache: pallid brown. It is a stain, she told herself. That’s all it is. She scrubbed fiercely. Outside, the beer-drinkers were coming in from the street. “Hanne,” called Boeblich.
O God, would it never go away? She gave it up at last and stacked the plate with the other dishes. But now it seemed the stain had fissioned, and transferred like an overlay to each of her retinae. 🔗

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chapter four
In which Esther
gets a nose
job 🔗

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Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture flowed syrupy around him and his passengers. 🔗

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navvy 🔗

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If alignment with the inanimate is the mark of a Bad Guy, Schoenmaker at least made a sympathetic beginning. But at some point along his way there occurred a shift in outlook so subtle that even Profane, who was unusually sensitive that way, probably couldn’t have detected it. He was kept going by hatred for Halidom and perhaps a fading love for Godolphin. These had given rise to what is called a “sense of mission”—something so tenuous it has to be fed more solid fare than either hatred or love. So it came to be sustained, plausibly enough, by a number of bloodless theories about the “idea” of the plastic surgeon. Having heard his vocation on the embattled wind, Schoenmaker’s dedication was toward repairing the havoc wrought by agencies outside his own sphere of responsibility. Others—politicians, and machines—carried on wars; others—perhaps human machines—condemned his patients to the ravages of acquired syphilis; others—on the highways, in the factories—undid the work of nature with automobiles, milling machines, other instruments of civilian disfigurement. What could he do toward eliminating the causes? They existed, formed a body of things-as-they-are; he came to be afflicted with a conservative laziness. It was social awareness of a sort, but with boundaries and interfaces which made it less than the catholic rage filling him that night in the barracks with the M.O. It was in short a deterioration of purpose; a decay. 🔗

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an assortment of different-sized teeth which leaned and crowded together like the headstones of a boneyard in tornado country. 🔗

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Few had ever asked for a so-called “perfect” nose, where the roof is straight, the tip untilted and unhooked, the columella (separating the nostrils) meeting the upper lip at 90 degrees. All of which went to support his private thesis that correction—along all dimensions: social, political, emotional—entails retreat to a diametric opposite rather than any reasonable search for a golden mean. 🔗

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armamentarium 🔗

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“Now,” gently, like a lover, “I’m going to saw off your hump.” Esther watched his eyes as best she could, looking for something human there. Never had she felt so helpless. Later she would say, “It was almost a mystic experience. What religion is it—one of the Eastern ones—where the highest condition we can attain is that of an object—a rock. It was like that; I felt myself drifting down, this delicious loss of Estherhood, becoming more and more a blob, with no worries, traumas, nothing: only Being . . .” 🔗

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chapter five
In which Stencil nearly
goes West with
an alliga-
tor 🔗

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“Just keep going the way you have. I am proud of you guys. I am so proud!”
They all shuffled around, embarrassed. Zeitsuss didn’t say anything else, just stood there half-turned watching an old Puerto Rican lady with a shopping basket limp her way uptown on the other side of Columbus Avenue. Zeitsuss was always saying how proud he was, and despite his loud mouth, his AF of L way of running things, his delusions of high purpose, they liked him. Because under the sharkskin and behind the tinted lenses, he was a bum too; only an accident of time and place kept them all from sharing a wine drunk together now. And because they liked him, his own pride in “our Patrol,” which none of them doubted, made them uncomfortable—thinking of the shadows they had fired at (wine-shadows, loneliness-shadows); the snoozes taken during working hours against the sides of flushing tanks near the rivers; the bitching they had done, but in whispers so quiet their partner didn’t even hear; the rats they had let get away because they felt sorry for them. They couldn’t share the boss’s pride but they could feel guilty about making what he felt a lie, having learned, through no very surprising or difficult schooling, that pride—in our Patrol, in yourself, even as a deadly sin—does not really exist in the same way that, say, three empty beer bottles exist to be cashed in for subway fare and warmth, someplace to sleep for a while. Pride you could exchange for nothing at all. What was Zeitsuss, the poor innocent, getting for it? Chopped down, was what. But they liked him and nobody had the heart to wise him up. 🔗

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“Aha,” crowed Ignatius, “then I cannot see how this differs from Marxist communism, which you told us is Godless. To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.” I tried to explain that there were different sorts of communism: that the early Church, indeed, was based on a common charity and sharing of goods. 🔗

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apocryphal 🔗

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V. came to me tonight, upset. She and Paul have been at it again. The weight of guilt is so heavy on the child. She almost sees it: as a huge, white, lumbering beast, pursuing her, wanting to devour her. We discussed Satan and his wiles for several hours. 🔗

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His back throbbed, he was getting tired. Beginning to wonder how much longer this would have to keep up. It was the longest he’d chased any alligator. He stopped for a minute, listened back along the tunnel. No sound except the dull wash of water. Angel wouldn’t be coming. He sighed and started plodding again toward the river. The alligator was burbling in the sewage, blowing bubbles and growling gently. Is it saying anything, he wondered. To me? He wound on, feeling soon he’d start to think about collapsing and just letting the stream float him out with pornographic pictures, coffee grounds, contraceptives used and unused, shit, up through the flushing tank to the East River and across on the tide to the stone forests of Queens. And to hell with this alligator and this hunt, here between chalkwritten walls of legend. It was no place to kill. He felt the eyes of ghost-rats, kept his own eyes ahead for fear he might see the 36-inch pipe that was Father Fairing’s sepulchre, tried to keep his ears closed to the sub-threshold squeakings of Veronica, the priest’s old love. 🔗

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Oh, man, thought Winsome, an intellectual. I had to pick an intellectual. They all revert. 🔗

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“MYSAH,” she said, which is Crew talk for Make Yourself At Home. 🔗

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“There’s nothing I love,” said Pig and paused. Rachel did not doubt this. “Than good shitkicking music.” 🔗

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“Come,” she said, grabbing her coat. “Fun, excitement, thrills. Stencil has just been wounded, tracking down a lead.”
Fu whistled, giggled. “Those leads are beginning to fight back.” 🔗

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chapter six
In which Profane returns
to street
level 🔗

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He lost count of all the bars they visited. He became drunk. His worst memory was of being alone with Fina somewhere in a telephone booth. They were discussing love. He couldn’t remember what he’d said. The only other thing he remembered between then and the time he woke up—in Union Square at sundown, blindfolded by a raging hangover and covered by a comforter of chilly pigeons who looked like vultures—was some sort of unpleasantness with the police after Angel and Geronimo had tried to smuggle parts of a toilet under their coats out of the men’s room in a bar on Second Avenue. 🔗

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Why? Why did she have to behave like he was a human being. Why couldn’t he be just an object of mercy. What did Fina have to go pushing it for? What did she want—which was a stupid question. She was a restless girl, this Josephine: warm and viscous-moving, ready to come in a flying machine or anyplace else. 🔗

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It was a desire he got, off and on, to be cruel and feel at the same time sorrow so big it filled him, leaked out his eyes and the holes in his shoes to make one big pool of human sorrow on the street, which had everything spilled on it from beer to blood, but very little compassion. 🔗

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“What took you so long?” She had him by the hand. It was dark in the room. He walked into a pool table. “Here,” she whispered. She was lying spread on the green felt. Corner pockets, side pockets, and Lucille. “There are some funny things I could say,” he began.
“They’ve all been said,” she whispered. In the dim light from the doorway, her fringed eyes seemed part of the felt. It was as if he were looking through her face to the surface of the table. Skirt raised, mouth open, teeth all white, sharp, ready to sink into whatever soft part of him got that close, oh she would surely haunt him. He unzipped his fly and started to climb up on the pool table. 🔗

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Like tinsel suddenly tossed on a Christmas tree, the merry twinkling of switchblades, tire irons and filed-down garrison belt buckles appeared among the crowd in the street. The girls on the stoop drew breath in concert through bared teeth. They watched eagerly, as if each had kicked in on a pool for who’d draw first blood. 🔗

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Almost as if there had been this agreement, a covenant, Profane giving death, the alligators giving him employment: tit for tat. He needed them and if they needed him at all it was because in some prehistoric circuit of the alligator brain they knew that as babies they’d been only another consumer-object, along with the wallets and pocketbooks of what might have been parents or kin, and all the junk of the world’s Macy’s. And the soul’s passage down the toilet and into the underworld was only a temporary peace-in-tension, borrowed time till they would have to return to being falsely animated kids’ toys. Of course they wouldn’t like it. Would want to go back to what they’d been; and the most perfect shape of that was dead—what else?—to be gnawed into exquisite rococo by rat-artisans, eroded to an antique bone-finish by the holy water of the Parish, tinted to phosphorescence by whatever had made that one alligator’s sepulchre so bright that night. 🔗

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“Baby,” he told the corpse, “you didn’t play it right. You don’t fight back. That’s not in the contract.” 🔗

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Maybe Profane had seen him under the street or at one of the shapeups. But there was a little half-smile and a kind of half-telepathy and it was as if this messenger had brought a message to Profane too, sheathed to everybody but the two of them in an envelope of eyebeams touching, that said: Who are you trying to kid? Listen to the wind.
He listened to the wind. The messenger left. “Mr. Winsome will see you in a moment,” said the receptionist. Profane wandered over to the window and looked down at Forty-second Street. It was as if he could see the wind, too. The suit felt wrong on him. Maybe it was doing nothing after all to conceal this curious Depression which showed up in no stock market or year-end report. “Hey, where are you going,” said the receptionist. “Changed my mind,” Profane told her. Out in the hall and going down in the elevator, in the lobby and in the street he looked for the messenger, but couldn’t find him. He unbuttoned the jacket of old Mendoza’s suit and shuffled along Forty-second Street, head down, straight into the wind. 🔗

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Uptown was a bleak district with no identity, where a heart never does anything so violent or final as break: merely gets increased tensile, compressive, shear loads piled on it bit by bit every day till eventually these and its own shudderings fatigue it. 🔗

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He wouldn’t go back to Mendozas’s, he figured. There was no more work under the street. What peace there had been was over. He had to come back to the surface, the dream-street. Soon he found a subway station, twenty minutes later he was downtown looking for a cheap mattress. 🔗

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chapter seven
She hangs on the
western
wall 🔗

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It appeared actually to have been little more than a change in nomenclature. Appointments became sessions, profound statements about oneself came to be prefaced by “My dentist says . . .” Psychodontia, like its predecessors, developed a jargon: you called neurosis “malocclusion,” oral, anal and genital stages “deciduous dentition,” id “pulp” and superego “enamel.”
The pulp is soft and laced with little blood vessels and nerves. The enamel, mostly calcium, is inanimate. These were the it and I psychodontia had to deal with. The hard, lifeless I covered up the warm, pulsing it; protecting and sheltering. 🔗

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Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which comes to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroys any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the ’30s, the curious fashions of the ’20s, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see. 🔗

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Signor Mantissa was not paying attention. His five feet three rested angular on the folding chair, a body small, well-wrought and somehow precious, as if it were the forgotten creation of any goldsmith—even Cellini—shrouded now in dark serge and waiting to be put up for auction. His eyes were streaked and rimmed with the pinkness of what seemed to be years of lamenting. Sunlight, bouncing off the Arno, off the fronts of shops, fractured into spectra by the falling rain, seemed to tangle or lodge in his blond hair, eyebrows, mustache, turning that face to a mask of inaccessible ecstasy; contradicting the sorrowing and weary eyeholes. You would be drawn inevitably again to these eyes, linger as you might have on the rest of the face: any Visitors’ Guide to Signor Mantissa must accord them an asterisk denoting special interest. Though offering no clue to their enigma; for they reflected a free-floating sadness, unfocused, indeterminate: a woman, the casual tourist might think at first, be almost convinced until some more catholic light moving in and out of a web of capillaries would make him not so sure. What then? Politics, perhaps. Thinking of gentle-eyed Mazzini with his lambent dreams, the observer would sense frailness, a poet-liberal. But if he kept watching long enough the plasma behind those eyes would soon run through every fashionable permutation of grief—financial trouble, declining health, destroyed faith, betrayal, impotence, loss—until eventually it would dawn on our tourist that he had been attending no wake after all: rather a street-long festival of sorrow with no booth the same, no exhibit offering anything solid enough to merit lingering at.
The reason was obvious and disappointing: simply that Signor Mantissa himself had been through them all, each booth was a permanent exhibit in memory of some time in his life when there had been a blond seamstress in Lyons, or an abortive plot to smuggle tobacco over the Pyrenees, or a minor assassination attempt in Belgrade. All his reversals had occurred, had been registered: he had assigned each one equal weight, had learned nothing from any of them except that they would happen again. Like Machiavelli he was in exile, and visited by shadows of rhythm and decay. He mused inviolate by the serene river of Italian pessimism, and all men were corrupt: history would continue to recapitulate the same patterns. There was hardly ever a dossier on him, wherever in the world his tiny, nimble feet should happen to walk. No one in authority seemed to care. He belonged to that inner circle of deracinated seers whose eyesight was clouded over only by occasional tears, whose outer rim was tangent to rims enclosing the Decadents of England and France, the Generation of ’98 in Spain, for whom the continent of Europe was like a gallery one is familiar with but long weary of, useful now only as shelter from the rain, or some obscure pestilence. 🔗

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He had been there. Fifteen years ago. And been fury-ridden since. Even in the Antarctic, huddling in hasty shelter from a winter storm, striking camp high on the shoulder of some as yet unnamed glacier, there would come to him hints of the perfume those people distill from the wings of black moths. Sometimes sentimental scraps of their music would seem to lace the wind; memories of their faded murals, depicting old battles and older love affairs among the gods, would appear without warning in the aurora. 🔗

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internecine 🔗

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“The colors. So many colors.” His eyes were tightly closed, his forehead resting on the bowed edge of one hand. “The trees outside the head shaman’s house have spider monkeys which are iridescent. They change color in the sunlight. Everything changes. The mountains, the lowlands are never the same color from one hour to the next. No sequence of colors is the same from day to day. As if you lived inside a madman’s kaleidoscope. Even your dreams become flooded with colors, with shapes no Occidental ever saw. Not real shapes, not meaningful ones. Simply random, the way clouds change over a Yorkshire landscape.” 🔗

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“But as if the place were, were a woman you had found somewhere out there, a dark woman tattooed from head to toes. And somehow you had got separated from the garrison and found yourself unable to get back, so that you had to be with her, close to her, day in and day out . . .”
“And you would be in love with her.”
“At first. But soon that skin, the gaudy godawful riot of pattern and color, would begin to get between you and whatever it was in her that you thought you loved. And soon, in perhaps only a matter of days, it would get so bad that you would begin praying to whatever god you knew of to send some leprosy to her. To flay that tattooing to a heap of red, purple and green debris, leave the veins and ligaments raw and quivering and open at last to your eyes and your touch. I’m sorry.” He wouldn’t look at her. 🔗

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However he came out of this, he would have to resign his commission and live from here on as a fugitive, a temporary occupant of pension rooms, a dweller in the demimonde. Marching through the dusk, he saw his fate complete, pre-assembled, inescapable. No matter how he tacked, yawed or dodged about he’d only be standing still while that treacherous reef loomed closer with every shift in course. 🔗

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He watched the tourists gaping at the Campanile; he watched dispassionately without effort, curiously without commitment. He wondered at this phenomenon of tourism: what was it drove them to Thomas Cook & Son in ever-increasing flocks every year to let themselves in for the Campagna’s fevers, the Levant’s squalor, the septic foods of Greece? To return to Ludgate Circus at the desolate end of every season having caressed the skin of each alien place, a peregrine or Don Juan of cities but no more able to talk of any mistress’s heart than to cease keeping that interminable Catalogue, that non picciol’ libro. Did he owe it to them, the lovers of skins, not to tell about Vheissu, not even to let them suspect the suicidal fact that below the glittering integument of every foreign land there is a hard dead-point of truth and that in all cases—even England’s—it is the same kind of truth, can be phrased in identical words? 🔗

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He wandered down Via dell’ Orivolo, counting the dark spaces between street lamps as he had once counted the number of puffs it took him to extinguish all his birthday candles. This year, next year, sometime, never. There were more candles at this point perhaps than even he could dream; but nearly all had been blown to twisted black wicks and the party needed very little to modulate to the most gently radiant of wakes. 🔗

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He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, the Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three. Hence the success or failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. This had led to the near-obsession with teamwork which had inspired his colleagues to dub him Soft-shoe Sidney, on the assumption that he was at his best working in front of a chorus line. 🔗

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“Ideas are so novel to them. Once they get hold of one, having the vague idea it is somehow precious, they wish to keep possession of it.” 🔗

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“They asked me about Vheissu,” the Gaucho mused. “What could I say? This time I really knew nothing. The English consider it important.”
“But they don’t tell you why. All they give you are mysterious hints. The Germans are apparently in on it. The Antarctic is concerned in some way. Perhaps in a matter of weeks, they say, the whole world will be plunged into apocalypse. And they think I am in on it. And you. Why else, if they are going to release us anyway, did they throw us into the same cell? We’ll be followed wherever we go. Here we are, in the thick of a grand cabal, and we haven’t the slightest notion of what’s going on.” 🔗

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Evan turned slowly to face his companion. “But I do believe them,” he said calmly. “Let me tell you. About my father. He would sit in my room, before I went to sleep, and spin yarns about this Vheissu. About the spider-monkeys, and the time he saw a human sacrifice, and the rivers whose fish are sometimes opalescent and sometimes the color of fire. They circle round you when you go in to bathe and dance a kind of elaborate ritual all about, to protect you from evil. And there are volcanoes with cities inside them which once every hundred years erupt into flaming hell but people go to live in them anyway. And men in the hills with blue faces and women in the valleys who give birth to nothing but sets of triplets, and beggars who belong to guilds and hold jolly festivals and entertainments all summer long.
“You know how a boy is. There comes a time for departure, a point where he sees confirmed the suspicion he’d had for some time that his father is not a god, not even an oracle. He sees that he no longer has any right to any such faith. So Vheissu becomes a bedtime story or fairy tale after all, and the boy a superior version of his merely human father. 🔗

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As if this condition of being just human, which had made Vheissu and my boy’s love for him a lie, were now vindicating them both for me, showing them to have been truth all along and after all. Because the Italians and the English in those consulates and even that illiterate clerk are all men. Their anxiety is the same as my father’s, what is coming to be my own, and perhaps in a few weeks what will be the anxiety of everyone living in a world none of us wants to see lit into holocaust. Call it a kind of communion, surviving somehow on a mucked-up planet which God knows none of us like very much. But it is our planet and we live on it anyway.” 🔗

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If there were, as some doctors of the mind were beginning to suspect, an ancestral memory, an inherited reservoir of primordial knowledge which shapes certain of our actions and casual desires, then not only her presence here and now between purgatory and hell, but also her entire commitment to Roman Catholicism as needful and plausible stemmed from and depended on an article of the primitive faith which glimmered shiny and supreme in that reservoir like a crucial valve-handle: the notion of the wraith or spiritual double, happening on rare occasions by multiplication but more often by fission, and the natural corollary which says the son is doppelgĂ€nger to the father. Having once accepted duality Victoria had found it only a single step to Trinity. And having seen the halo of a second and more virile self flickering about old Godolphin, she waited now outside the prison while somewhere to her right a girl sang lonely, telling a tale of hesitation, between a rich man who was old and a young man who was fair. 🔗

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He felt that belief in Vheissu gave him no right any more to doubt as arrogantly as he had before, that perhaps wherever he went from now on he would perform like penance a ready acceptance of miracles or visions such as this meeting at the crossroads seemed to him to be. 🔗

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“Perhaps we are in limbo,” he said. “Or like the place we met: some still point between hell and purgatory. Strange there’s no Via del Paradiso anywhere in Florence.”
“Perhaps nowhere in the world.”
For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world’s affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence. For them the music was sweet and painful, the strolling chains of tourists like a Dance of Death. They stood on the curb, gazing at one another, jostled against by hawkers and sightseers, lost as much perhaps in that bond of youth as in the depths of the eyes each contemplated. 🔗

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“What did you see?” asked Signor Mantissa, leaning forward.
“Nothing,” Godolphin whispered. “It was Nothing I saw.” Signor Mantissa reached out a hand to the old man’s shoulder. “Understand,” Godolphin said, bowed and motionless, “I had been tortured by Vheissu for fifteen years. I dreamed of it, half the time I lived in it. It wouldn’t leave me. Colors, music, fragrances. No matter where I got assigned, I was pursued by memories. Now I am pursued by agents. That feral and lunatic dominion cannot afford to let me escape.
“Raf, you will be ridden by it longer than I. I haven’t much time left. You must never tell anyone, I won’t ask for your promise; I take that for granted. I have done what no man has done. I have been at the Pole.”
“The Pole. My friend. Then why have we not—”
“Seen it in the press. Because I made it that way. They found me, you remember, at the last depot, half dead and snowed in by a blizzard. Everyone assumed I had tried for the Pole and failed. But I was on my way back. I let them tell it their way. Do you see? I had thrown away a sure knighthood, rejected glory for the first time in my career, something my son has been doing since he was born. Evan is rebellious, his was no sudden decision. But mine was, sudden and necessary, because of what I found waiting for me at the Pole.” 🔗

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“It was a foolish thing,” Godolphin said, “what I did. There was nearly a mutiny. After all, one man, trying for the Pole, in the dead of winter. They thought I was insane. Possibly I was, by that time. But I had to reach it. I had begun to think that there, at one of the only two motionless places on this gyrating world, I might have peace to solve Vheissu’s riddle. Do you understand? I wanted to stand in the dead center of the carousel, if only for a moment; try to catch my bearings. And sure enough: waiting for me was my answer. I’d begun to dig a cache nearby, after planting the flag. The barrenness of that place howled around me, like a country the demiurge had forgotten. There could have been no more entirely lifeless and empty place anywhere on earth. Two or three feet down I struck clear ice. A strange light, which seemed to move inside it, caught my attention. I cleared a space away. Staring up at me through the ice, perfectly preserved, its fur still rainbow-colored, was the corpse of one of their spider monkeys. It was quite real; not like the vague hints they had given me before. I say ‘they had given.’ I think they left it there for me. Why? Perhaps for some alien, not-quite-human reason that I can never comprehend. Perhaps only to see what I would do. A mockery, you see: a mockery of life, planted where everything but Hugh Godolphin was inanimate. With of course the implication . . . It did tell me the truth about them. If Eden was the creation of God, God only knows what evil created Vheissu. The skin which had wrinkled through my nightmares was all there had ever been. Vheissu itself, a gaudy dream. Of what the Antarctic in this world is closest to: a dream of annihilation.” 🔗

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Evan let his hand rest splayed on Godolphin’s back. Neither moved for a moment. “On the barge,” Evan said, “there we’ll be able to talk.”
The old man turned at last. “Time we got round to it.”
“We will,” Evan said, trying to smile. “After all, here we’ve been, so many years, biffing about at opposite ends of the world.”
The old man did not answer, but burrowed his face against Evan’s shoulder. Both felt slightly embarrassed. Victoria watched them for a moment, then turned away to gaze, placid, at the rioting. Shots began to ring out. Blood began to stain the pavements, screams to punctuate the singing of the Figli di Machiavelli. She saw a rioter in a shirt of motley, sprawled over the limb of a tree, being bayoneted again and again by two soldiers. She stood as still as she had at the crossroads waiting for Evan; her face betrayed no emotion. It was as if she saw herself embodying a feminine principle, acting as complement to all this bursting, explosive male energy. Inviolate and calm, she watched the spasms of wounded bodies, the fair of violent death, framed and staged, it seemed, for her alone in that tiny square. From her hair the heads of five crucified also looked on, no more expressive than she. 🔗

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Inside the Sala di Lorenzo Monaco Cesare unsheathed a razor-edged dagger and prepared to slice the Botticelli from its frame. Signor Mantissa gazed at her, at the asymmetric eyes, tilt of the frail head, streaming gold hair. He could not move; as if he were any gentle libertine before a lady he had writhed for years to possess, and now that the dream was about to be consummated he had been struck suddenly impotent. Cesare dug the knife into the canvas, began to saw downward. Light, shining in from the street, reflected from the blade, flickering from the lantern they had brought, danced over the painting’s gorgeous surface. Signor Mantissa watched its movement, a slow horror growing in him. In that instant he was reminded of Hugh Godolphin’s spider-monkey, still shimmering through crystal ice at the bottom of the world. The whole surface of the painting now seemed to move, to be flooded with color and motion. He thought, for the first time in years, of the blond seamstress in Lyons. She would drink absinthe at night and torture herself for it in the afternoon. God hated her, she said. At the same time she was finding it more difficult to believe in him. She wanted to go to Paris, she had a pleasant voice, did she not? She would go on the stage, it had been her dream since girlhood. Countless mornings, in the hours when passion’s inertia of motion had carried them along faster than sleep could overtake them, she had poured out to him schemes, despairs, all tiny, relevant loves.
What sort of mistress, then, would Venus be? What outlying worlds would he conquer in their headlong, three-in-the-morning excursions away from the cities of sleep? What of her God, her voice, her dreams? She was already a goddess. She had no voice he could ever hear. And she herself (perhaps even her native demesne?) was only . . .
A gaudy dream, a dream of annihilation. Was that what Godolphin had meant? Yet she was no less Rafael Mantissa’s entire love. 🔗

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Cesare waved. “A rivederci.” Soon they had disappeared, dissolved in the darkness. Cesare put his hands in his pockets and started to stroll. He found a stone in the street and began to kick it aimlessly along the Lungarno. Soon, he thought, I will go and buy a liter fiasco of Chianti. As he passed the Palazzo Corsini, towering nebulous and fair above him, he thought: what an amusing world it still is, where things and people can be found in places where they do not belong. For example, out there on the river now with a thousand liters of wine are a man in love with Venus, and a sea captain, and his fat son. And back in the Uffizi . . . He roared aloud. In the room of Lorenzo Monaco, he remembered amazed, before Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, still blooming purple and gay, there is a hollow Judas tree. 🔗

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chapter eight
In which Rachel gets her yo-yo
back, Roony sings a song,
and Stencil calls
on Bloody
Chiclitz 🔗

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If he’d been the type who evolves theories of history for his own amusement, he might have said all political events: wars, governments and uprisings, have the desire to get laid as their roots; because history unfolds according to economic forces and the only reason anybody wants to get rich is so he can get laid steadily, with whomever he chooses. 🔗

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He happened to look down. His erection had produced in the newspaper a crosswise fold, which moved line by line down the page as the swelling gradually diminished. It was a list of employment agencies. Okay, thought Profane, just for the heck of it I will close my eyes, count three and open them and whatever agency listing that fold is on I will go to them. It will be like flipping a coin: inanimate schmuck, inanimate paper, pure chance. 🔗

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Smiling and waving hello to everyone in her country, she clickety-clacked gracefully over to her desk. He could hear the quiet brush of her thighs, kissing each other in their nylon. Oh, oh, he thought, look at what I seem to be getting again. Go down, you bastard. 🔗

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He sat down quickly. She lit a cigarette and cased the upper half of his body. “It’s about time,” she said.
He fumbled for a cigarette, nervous. She flicked over a pack of matches with a fingernail he could feel already gliding across his back, poised to dig in frenzied when she should come. 🔗

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Strangely then the tumescence began to subside, the flesh at his neck to pale. Any sovereign or broken yo-yo must feel like this after a short time of lying inert, rolling, falling: suddenly to have its own umbilical string reconnected, and know the other end is in hands it cannot escape. Hands it doesn’t want to escape. Know that the simple clockwork of itself has no more need for symptoms of inutility, lonesomeness, directionlessness, because now it has a path marked out for it over which it has no control. That’s what the feeling would be, if there were such things as animate yo-yos. Pending any such warp in the world Profane felt like the closest thing to one and above her eyes began to doubt his own animateness. 🔗

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In came Pig Bodine and Charisma, singing a drinking song:
There are sick bars in every town in America,
Where sick people can pass the time o’ day.
You can screw on the floor in Baltimore,
Make Freudian scenes in New Orleans,
Talk Zen and Beckett in Keokuk, Ioway.
There’s espresso machines in Terre Haute, Indiana
Which is a cultural void if ever a void there be,
But though I’ve dragged my ass from Boston, Mass.
To the wide Pacific sea,
The Rusty Spoon is still the bar for me,
The Rusty Spoon is the only place for me. 🔗

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The spring thus wore on, large currents and small eddies alike resulting in headlines. People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history’s rags and straws. 🔗

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Stencil fell outside the pattern. Civil servant without rating, architect-by-necessity of intrigues and breathings-together, he should have been, like his father, inclined toward action. But spent his days instead at a certain vegetation, talking with Eigenvalue, waiting for Paola to reveal how she fitted into this grand Gothic pile of inferences he was hard at work creating. Of course too there were his “leads” which he hunted down now lackadaisical and only half-interested, as if there were after all something more important he ought to be doing. What this mission was, however, came no clearer to him than the ultimate shape of his V-structure—no clearer, indeed, than why he should have begun pursuit of V. in the first place. He only felt (he said “by instinct”) when a bit of information was useful, when not: when a lead ought to be abandoned, when hounded to the inevitable looped trail. Naturally about drives as intellectualized as Stencil’s there can be no question of instinct: the obsession was acquired, surely, but where along the line, how in the world? Unless he was as he insisted purely the century’s man, something which does not exist in nature. It would be simple in Rusty Spoon–talk to call him contemporary man in search of an identity. Many of them had already decided this was his Problem. The only trouble was that Stencil had all the identities he could cope with conveniently right at the moment: he was quite purely He Who Looks for V. (and whatever impersonations that might involve), and she was no more his own identity than Eigenvalue the soul-dentist or any other member of the Crew. 🔗

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If she was a historical fact then she continued active today and at the moment, because the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name was as yet unrealized, though V. might be no more a she than a sailing vessel or a nation. 🔗

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chapter nine
Mondaugen’s
story 🔗

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sferics 🔗

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“To hell with them out there. Let them have their war. In here we shall hold Fasching. Bolt the doors, seal the windows, tear down the plank bridges and distribute arms. Tonight we enter a state of siege.” 🔗

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venality 🔗

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As the distance between them gradually diminished Mondaugen saw that her left eye was artificial: she, noticing his curiosity, obligingly removed the eye and held it out to him in the hollow of her hand. A bubble blown translucent, its “white” would show up when in the socket as a half-lit sea green. A fine network of nearly microscopic fractures covered its surface. Inside were the delicately-wrought wheels, springs, ratchets of a watch, wound by a gold key which FrĂ€ulein Meroving wore on a slender chain round her neck. Darker green and flecks of gold had been fused into twelve vaguely zodiacal shapes, placed annular on the surface of the bubble to represent the iris and also the face of the watch. 🔗

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“I am Hedwig Vogelsang,” she informed him, “and my purpose on earth is to tantalize and send raving the race of man.” Whereupon the musicians, hidden from them in an alcove behind a hanging arras, struck up a kind of schottische; Mondaugen, overcome by the sudden scent of musk, brought in a puff to his nostrils by interior winds which could not have arisen by accident, seized her round the waist and wheeled with her across the room, and out, and through a bedroom lined with mirrors, round a canopied four-poster and into a long gallery, stabbed at ten-yard intervals down its length by yellow daggers of African sun, hung with nostalgic landscapes of a Rhine valley that never existed, portraits of Prussian officers who’d died long before Caprivi (some even before Bismarck) and their blond, untender ladies who’d nothing now but dust to bloom in; past rhythmic gusts of blond sun that crazed the eyeballs with vein-images; out of the gallery and into a tiny unfurnished room hung all in black velvet, high as the house, narrowing into a chimney and open at the top, so that one could see the stars in the daytime; finally down three or four steps to Foppl’s own planetarium, a circular room with a great wooden sun, overlaid with gold leaf, burning cold in the very center and round it the nine planets and their moons, suspended from tracks in the ceiling, actuated by a coarse cobweb of chains, pulleys, belts, racks, pinions and worms, all receiving their prime impulse from a treadmill in the corner, usually operated for the amusement of the guests by a Bondelswaartz, now unoccupied. Having long fled all vestiges of music Mondaugen released her here, skipped to the treadmill and began a jog-trot that set the solar system in motion, creaking and whining in a way that raised a prickling in the teeth. Rattling, shuddering, the wooden planets began to rotate and spin, Saturn’s rings to whirl, moons their precessions, our own Earth its nutational wobble, all picking up speed; as the girl continued to dance, having chosen the planet Venus for her partner; as Mondaugen dashed along his own geodesic, following in the footsteps of a generation of slaves. 🔗

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“Certainly. Now I have to go back, it’s that simple. I’m beginning to think that if I get through our siege party I shall be quite ready for anything the Antarctic has for me.”
Mondaugen was inclined to agree. “Though I don’t plan on any little Antarctic.”
The old sea dog chuckled. “Oh there will be. You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic.” 🔗

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“Politics is a kind of engineering, isn’t it. With people as your raw material.” 🔗

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He emerged from the billiard room to hot jazz from somewhere overhead. Blinking, he made his way up marble steps to the grand ballroom and found the dance floor empty. Clothing of both sexes was littered about; the music, which came from a Gramophone in the corner, roared gay and hollow under the electric chandelier. But no one was there, no one at all. He plodded up to his turret room with its ludicrous circular bed and found that a typhoon of sferics had been bombarding the earth. He fell asleep and dreamed, for the first time since he’d left it, of Munich. 🔗

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Beneath a tree, near one of the infrequent streetlights, he came upon a boy and girl, coupled, one of the girl’s fat and aging thighs exposed to the still-winter wind. He stooped and covered them with his old jacket, his tears fell and froze in mid-air, and rattled like sleet on the couple, who’d turned to stone. 🔗

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Vera Meroving appeared (why Vera? her black mask covered the entire head) in black sweater and black dancer’s tights. “Come,” she whispered; led him by the hand through narrow streets, hardly lit but thronged with celebrants who sang and cheered in tubercular voices. White faces, like diseased blooms, bobbed along in the dark as if moved by other forces toward some graveyard, to pay homage at an important burial. 🔗

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General Lothar von Trotha 🔗

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the pain of a return home choking him more than any noose of memory she could provide 🔗

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Godolphin laughed at her. “There’s been a war, FrĂ€ulein. Vheissu was a luxury, an indulgence. We can no longer afford the likes of Vheissu.”
“But the need,” she protested, “its void. What can fill that?”
He cocked his head and grinned at her. “What is already filling it. The real thing. Unfortunately. 🔗

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The only trouble is that now, nearing eighty, I keep discovering that damned war has made the world older than I. The world frowns now on youth in a vacuum, it insists youth be turned-to, utilized, exploited. No time for pranks. No more Vheissus. Ah, well.” 🔗

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“Till we’ve done it, we’re taught that it’s evil. Having done it, then’s the struggle: to admit to yourself that it’s not really evil at all. That like forbidden sex it’s enjoyable.” 🔗

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This time it wasn’t like that. Things seemed all at once to fall into a pattern: a great cosmic fluttering in the blank, bright sky and each grain of sand, each cactus spine, each feather of the circling vulture above them and invisible molecule of heated air seemed to shift imperceptibly so that this black and he, and he and every other black he would henceforth have to kill slid into alignment, assumed a set symmetry, a dancelike poise. It finally meant something different: different from the recruiting poster, the mural in the church and the natives already exterminated—sleeping and lame burned en masse in their pontoks, babies tossed in the air and caught on bayonets, girls approached with organ at the ready, their eves filming over in anticipated pleasure or possibly only an anticipated five more minutes of life, only to be shot through the head first and then ravished, after of course being made aware at the last moment that this would happen to them—different from the official language of von Trotha’s orders and directives, different from the sense of function and the delightful, powerless languor that are both part of following a military order that’s filtered like spring rain down countless levels before reaching you; different from colonial policy, international finagling, hope of advancement within the Army or enrichment out of it.
It had only to do with the destroyer and the destroyed, and the act which united them, and it had never been that way before. 🔗

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Just as its own loose sand was licked away by the cold tongue of a current from the Antarctic south, that coast began to devour time the moment you arrived. 🔗

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paroxysms 🔗

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The accordionist had brought his instrument, but after a few bars was silenced: no one on the roof wanted to miss any sound of death that should reach them. They leaned toward the battle: cords of the neck drawn tense, eyes sleep-puffed, hair in disarray and dotted with dandruff, fingers with dirty nails clutching like talons the sun-reddened stems of their wine goblets; lips blackened with yesterday’s wine, nicotine, blood and drawn back from the tartared teeth so that the original hue only showed in cracks. 🔗

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“The world is all that the case is,” 🔗

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Mondaugen remained up in his turret, working diligently at his code, taking occasional breaks to stand out alone on the roof and wonder if he would ever escape a curse that seemed to have been put on him one Fasching: to become surrounded by decadence no matter what exotic region, north or south, he wandered into. It couldn’t be only Munich, he decided at some point: nor even the fact of economic depression. This was a soul-depression which must surely infest Europe as it infested this house. 🔗

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chapter ten
In which various
sets of young
people get
together 🔗

id873516190

righteous moss 🔗

id873522740

“Crazy,” said McClintic, having lost him back there someplace. But one thing that did occur to him was if a computer’s brain could go flip and flop, why so could a musician’s. As long as you were flop, everything was cool. But where did the trigger-pulse come from to make you flip? 🔗

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After a while he said, not really to her, “Ruby, what happened after the war? That war, the world flipped. But come ’45, and they flopped. Here in Harlem they flopped. Everything got cool—no love, no hate, no worries, no excitement. Every once in a while, though, somebody flips back. Back to where he can love . . .”
“Maybe that’s it,” the girl said, after a while. “Maybe you have to be crazy to love somebody.”
“But you take a whole bunch of people flip at the same time and you’ve got a war. Now war is not loving, is it?”
“Flip, flop,” she said, “get the mop.” 🔗

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While Slab lounged meticulous about his canvas, Cheese Danish No. 41, making quick little stabs with a fine old kolinsky brush at the surface of the painting. Two brown slugs—snails without shells—lay crosswise and copulating on a polygonal slab of marble, a translucent white bubble rising between them. No impasto here: “long” paint, everything put there more than real could ever be. Weird illumination, shadows all wrong, surfaces of marble, slugs and a half-eaten cheese Danish in the upper right textured painstakingly fine. So that their slimy trails, converging straight and inevitable from bottom and side to the X of their union, did shine like moonlight.
And Charisma, Fu and Pig Bodine came rollicking out of a grocery store up on the West Side, yelling football signals and tossing a poor-looking eggplant about under the lights of Broadway.
And Rachel and Roony sat on a bench in Sheridan Square, talking about Mafia and Paola. It was one in the morning, a wind had risen and something curious too had happened; as if everyone in the city, simultaneously, had become sick of news of any kind; for thousands of newspaper pages blew through the small park on the way crosstown, blundered like pale bats against the trees, tangled themselves around the feet of Roony and Rachel, and of a bum sleeping across the way. Millions of unread and useless words had come to a kind of life in Sheridan Square; while the two on the bench wove cross-talk of their own, oblivious, among them.
And Stencil sat dour and undrunk, in the Rusty Spoon, while Slab’s friend, another Catatonic Expressionist, harangued him with the Great Betrayal, told of the Dance of Death. While around them something of the sort was in fact going on: for here was the Whole Sick Crew, was it not, linked maybe by a spectral chain and rollicking along over some moor or other. Stencil thought of Mondaugen’s story, the Crew at Foppl’s, saw here the same leprous pointillism of orris root, weak jaws and bloodshot eyes, tongues and backs of teeth stained purple by this morning’s homemade wine, lipstick which it seemed could be peeled off intact, tossed to the earth to join a trail of similar jetsam—the disembodied smiles or pouts which might serve, perhaps, as spoor for next generation’s Crew . . . God.
“Wha,” said the Catatonic Expressionist.
“Melancholy,” said Stencil.
And Mafia Winsome, mateless, stood undressed before the mirror, contemplating herself and little else. And the cat yowled in the courtyard.
And who knew where Paola was? 🔗

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But they produced nothing but talk and at that not very good talk. A few like Slab actually did what they professed; turned out a tangible product. But again, what? Cheese Danishes. Or this technique for the sake of technique—Catatonic Expressionism. Or parodies on what someone else had already done.
So much for Art. What of Thought? The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way. Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways. Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid. Depending on how others reacted they were In or Out. The number of blocks, however, was finite.
“Mathematically, boy,” he told himself, “if nobody else original comes along, they’re bound to run out of arrangements someday. What then?” What indeed. This sort of arranging and rearranging was Decadence, but the exhaustion of all possible permutations and combinations was death. 🔗

Arranging and rearranging was decadence, exhaustion of combinations is death.

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Out in front of a seafood place on the main and only drag, they found two more musicians playing mumbledy-peg with clam knives. They were en route to a party. “O yes,” they cried in unison. One climbed in the Triumph’s trunk, the other, who had a bottle—rum, 150 proof—and a pineapple, sat on the hood. At 80 mph over roads which are ill-lit and near-unusable by the end of the season, this happy hood-ornament cut open the fruit with a clam knife and built rum-and-pineapple-juices in paper cups which McClintic’s bass handed him over the windscreen. 🔗

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Back in August 1956, rollicking was the Whole Sick Crew’s favorite pastime, in- or outdoor. One of the frequent forms it took was yo-yoing. Though probably not inspired by Profane’s peregrinations along the East Coast, the Crew did undertake something similar on a city-scale. Rule: you had to be genuinely drunk. Certain of the theater crowd inhabiting the Spoon had had fantastic yo-yo records invalidated because it was discovered later they’d been sober all along: “Quarterdeck drunkards,” Pig called them scornfully. Rule: you had to wake up at least once on each transit. Otherwise there’d only be a time gap, and that you could have spent on a bench in the subway station. Rule: it had to be a subway line running up- and downtown, because this is the way a yo-yo goes. In the early days of yo-yoing certain false “champions” had admitted shamefaced to racking up scores on the Forty-second Street shuttle, which was looked on now as something of a scandal in yo-yo circles. 🔗

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chapter eleven
Confessions of Fausto
Maijstral 🔗

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Why? Why use the room as introduction to an apologia? Because the room, though windowless and cold at night, is a hothouse. Because the room is the past, though it has no history of its own. Because, as the physical being-there of a bed or horizontal plane determines what we call love; as a high place must exist before God’s word can come to a flock and any sort of religion begin; so must there be a room, sealed against the present, before we can make any attempt to deal with the past. 🔗

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how can a man write his life unless he is virtually certain of the hour of his death? A harrowing question. 🔗

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Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life a successive rejection of personalities. No apologia is any more than a romance—half a fiction—in which all the successive identities taken on and rejected by the writer as a function of linear time are treated as separate characters. The writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another “character” added to the past. So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn’t so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with “reason.” 🔗

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Now memory is a traitor: gilding, altering. The word is, in sad fact, meaningless, based as it is on the false assumption that identity is single, soul continuous. A man has no more right to set forth any self-memory as truth than to say “Maratt is a sour-mouthed University cynic” or “Dnubietna is a liberal and madman.” 🔗

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How wondrous is this St. Giles Fair called history! Her rhythms pulse regular and sinusoidal—a freak show in caravan, travelling over thousands of little hills. A serpent hypnotic and undulant, bearing on her back like infinitesimal fleas such hunchbacks, dwarves, prodigies, centaurs, poltergeists! Two-headed, three-eyed, hopelessly in love; satyrs with the skin of werewolves, werewolves with the eyes of young girls and perhaps even an old man with a navel of glass, through which can be seen goldfish nuzzling the coral country of his guts. 🔗

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Perhaps British colonialism has produced a new sort of being, a dual man, aimed two ways at once: toward peace and simplicity on the one hand, towards an exhausted intellectual searching on the other. Perhaps Maratt, Dnubietna and Maijstral are the first of a new race. What monsters shall rise in our wake. . . . 🔗

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But the excerpt shows clearly a charming quality of youth: to begin with optimism; and once the inadequacy of optimism is borne in on him by an inevitably hostile world, to retreat into abstractions. Abstractions even in the midst of the bombing. 🔗

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Surely if war has any nobility it is in the rebuilding not the destruction. 🔗

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Oh we were full of lyrical lines like “At the Phoenicia Hotel.” Free verse: why not? There was simply not the time to cast it into rhyme or metre, to take care with assonance and ambiguity. Poetry had to be as hasty and rough as eating, sleep or sex. Jury-rigged and not as graceful as it might have been. But it did the job; put the truth on record.
“Truth” I mean, in the sense of attainable accuracy. No metaphysics. Poetry is not communication with angels or with the “subconscious.” It is communication with the guts, genitals and five portals of sense. Nothing more. 🔗

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From the quick to the inanimate. The great “movement” of the Siege poetry. As went Fausto II’s already dual soul. All the while only in the process of learning life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane. 🔗

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Decadence, decadence. What is it? Only a clear movement toward death or, preferably, non-humanity. 🔗

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They are possessed. Or: the same forces which dictate the bomb’s trajectory, the deaths of stars, the wind and the waterspout have focussed somewhere inside the pelvic frontiers without their consent, to generate one more mighty accident. It frightens them to death. It would frighten anyone. 🔗

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Early sun still low on the sea. Blinding. Long blinding track, white road in from the sun to point of view. Sound of Messerschmitts. Invisible. Sound which grows louder. Spitfires scramble aloft, high angle of climb. Small, black in such bright sun. Course towards sun. Dirty marks appear on the sky. Orange-brown-yellow. Colour of excrement. Black. Sun turns the edges gold. And the edges trail like jellyfish towards the horizon. Marks spread, new ones bloom in the centres of old. Air up there is often so still. Other times a wind, up high, must streak them into nothing in seconds. Wind, machines, dirty smoke. Sometimes the sun. When there’s rain nothing can be seen. But the wind sweeps in and down and everything can be heard. 🔗

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It is a universal sin among the false-animate or unimaginative to refuse to let well enough alone. Their compulsion to gather together, their pathological fear of loneliness extends on past the threshold of sleep; so that when they turn the corner, as we all must, as we all have done and do—some more often than others—to find ourselves on the street . . . You know the street I mean, child. The street of the Twentieth Century, at whose far end or turning—we hope—is some sense of home or safety. But no guarantees. A street we are put at the wrong end of, for reasons best known to the agents who put us there. If there are agents. But a street we must walk. 🔗

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It is the acid test. To populate, or not to populate. Ghosts, monsters, criminals, deviates represent melodrama and weakness. The only horror about them is the dreamer’s own horror of isolation. But the desert, or a row of false shop fronts; a slag pile, a forge where the fires are banked, these and the street and the dreamer, only an inconsequential shadow himself in the landscape, partaking of the soullessness of these other masses and shadows; this is Twentieth Century nightmare. 🔗

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How beautiful is blackout in Valletta. Before tonight’s “plot” comes in from the north. Night fills the street like a black fluid; flows along the gutters, its current tugging at your ankles. As if the city were underwater; an Atlantis, under the night sea. 🔗

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But in dream there are two worlds: the street and under the street. One is the kingdom of death and one of life. And how can a poet live without exploring the other kingdom, even if only as a kind of tourist? A poet feeds on dream. If no convoys come what else is there to feed on? 🔗

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defilade 🔗

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Paola: my child, Elena’s child but most of all Malta’s, you were one of them. These children knew what was happening: knew that bombs killed. But what’s a human, after all? No different from a church, obelisk, statue. Only one thing matters: it’s the bomb that wins. Their view of death was non-human. One wonders if our grown-up attitudes, hopelessly tangled as they were with love, social forms and metaphysics, worked any better. Certainly there was more common sense about the children’s way. 🔗

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O God, it was the same stupidity to be gone through again: the sudden fall in the barometer which we did not expect; the bad faith of dreams that send surprise skirmish-parties across a frontier which ought to be stable; the terror at the unfamiliar stair-step in the dark on what we thought was a level street. We’d traced nostalgic steps indeed this afternoon. Where had they brought us?
To a park we’d never find again.
We had been using, it seemed, nothing but Valletta to fill up the hollows of ourselves. Stone and metal cannot nourish. We sat hungry-eyed, listening to the nervous leaves. What could there be to feed on? Only one another. 🔗

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In the dusk her eyes had grown huge and filmed. I tried to look at the whites as we look at the margins of a page, trying to avoid what was written in iris-black. Was it only night “gathering” outside? Something nightlike had found its way here, distilled and pre-shaped in eyes that only this morning had reflected sun, whitecaps, real children. 🔗

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There had been nothing. Whether children, maddened leaves or dream-meteorology were or were not real, there are no epiphanies on Malta this season, no moments of truth. We had used our dead fingernails only to swage quick flesh; to gouge or destroy, not to probe the wards of either soul. 🔗

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The Germans to be sure were pure evil and the Allies pure good. The children weren’t alone in that feeling. But if their idea of the struggle could be described graphically it would not be as two equal-sized vectors head-to-head—their heads making an X of unknown quantity; rather as a point, dimensionless—good—surrounded by any number of radial arrows—vectors of evil—pointing inward. Good, i.e., at bay. The Virgin assailed. The wingùd mother protective. The woman passive. Malta in siege. 🔗

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Other children crowded round her head. One pried her jaws apart while another removed a set of false teeth. She did not struggle: only closed her eyes and waited.
But she could not even keep them closed. For the children peeled back one eyelid to reveal a glass eye with the iris in the shape of a clock. This, too, they removed. 🔗

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chapter twelve
In which things are not
so amusing 🔗

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Thus the maverick daughter of Stuyvesant Owlglass perched like any pinup beauty. Ready at the slightest pressure surge in the blood lines, endocrine imbalance, quickening of nerves at the love-breeding zones to pivot into some covenant with Profane the schlemihl. Her breasts seemed to expand toward him, but he stood fast; unwilling to retreat from pleasure, unwilling to convict himself of love for bums, himself, her, unwilling to see her proved inanimate as the rest.
Why that last? Only a general desire to find somebody for once on the right or real side of the TV screen? What made her hold any promise of being any more human?
You ask too many questions, he told himself. Stop asking, take. Give. Whatever she wants to call it. Whether the bulge is in your skivvies or your brain do something. She doesn’t know, you don’t know. 🔗

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defenestration 🔗

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This time he slung Winsome over a shoulder and started grimly up the fire escape. Winsome slithered away and ran down another floor. “Ah, good,” he said. “Still four stories. High enough.” 🔗

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chapter thirteen
In which the yo-yo string
is revealed as a
state of
mind 🔗

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“You have to grow up,” she finally said. “That’s all: my own unlucky boy, didn’t you ever think maybe ours is an act too? We’re older than you, we lived inside you once: the fifth rib, closest to the heart. We learned all about it then. After that it had to become our game to nourish a heart you all believe is hollow though we know different. Now you all live inside us, for nine months, and whenever you decide to come back after that.” 🔗

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“Didn’t anybody ever tell you,” said this worthy, “about the biological effects of r-f energy?”
“Wha,” said Pig.
“Stand in front of the radar antenna,” said Hiroshima, “while it is radiating, and what it will do is, it will make you temporarily sterile.” 🔗

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“Someday,” Pig said, “I will have to tell you about the biological effects of r-f energy.” And so saying inverted the white hat in the direction of Hiroshima and Howie Surd, showering them both with cooked hamburger.
“Anything you want,” Pig said then, “just ask, buddy. I have a code and I don’t forget.”
“Okay,” Profane said a few years later, standing by Paola’s bed in an apartment on Nueva York’s 112th Street and twisting Pig’s collar a little, “I’m collecting that one now.” 🔗

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“Once I will say it, is all: that Crew does not live, it experiences. It does not create, it talks about people who do. Varùse, Ionesco, de Kooning, Wittgenstein, I could puke. It satirizes itself and doesn’t mean it. Time magazine takes it seriously and does mean it.”
“It’s fun.” 🔗

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“Where do you belong, Profane?”
“Wherever I am.”
“Deracinated. Which of them is not. Which of this Crew couldn’t pick up tomorrow and go off to Malta, go off to the moon. Ask them why and they’ll answer why not.” 🔗

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Without thinking: “What about love? When are you going to end your virgin status there, Ben?”
In reply Profane fell out of bed, crawled to the bathroom and hung over the toilet, thinking about barfing. 🔗

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“You know what I always thought? That you were an accessory. That you, flesh, you’d fall apart sooner than the car. That the car would go on, in a junkyard even it would look like it always had, and it would have to be a thousand years before that thing could rust so you wouldn’t recognize it. But old Rachel, she’d be long gone. A part, a cheesy part, like a radio, heater, windshield-wiper blade.”
She looked upset. He pushed it.
“I only started to think about being a schlemihl, about a world of things that had to be watched out for, after I saw you alone with the MG. I didn’t even stop to think it might be perverted, what I was watching. All I was was scared.”
“Showing how much you know about girls.” 🔗

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“Why?” said Profane.
“Why not?” said Stencil. “His giving you any clear reason would mean he’d already found her. Why does one decide to pick up one girl in a bar over another. If one knew why, she would never be a problem. Why do wars start: if one knew why there would be eternal peace. So in this search the motive is part of the quarry. 🔗

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“Who knows. Stencil would rather depend on the imperfect vision of humans for his history. Somehow government reports, bar graphs, mass movements are too treacherous.” 🔗

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He got the window open, climbed inside and unlocked for Stencil. Wasting no time, Stencil proceeded through a train of rooms to the museum, forced open the case, slipped that set of false teeth wrought from all precious metals into a coat pocket. From another room he heard more glass breaking. 🔗

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chapter fourteen
V. in love 🔗

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The lady was absorbed in burning tiny holes with the tip of her cigarette, through the skirt of the young girl. Itague watched as the pattern grew. She was writing ma fĂ©tiche, in black-rimmed holes. The sculptress wore no lingerie. So that when the lady finished the words would be spelled out by the young sheen of the girl’s thighs. Defenseless? Itague wondered briefly. 🔗

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They moved over the stage like languid moths, gauzy tunics fluttering limp. 🔗

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“Do you know what a fetish is? Something of a woman which gives pleasure but is not a woman. A shoe, a locket . . . une jarretiĂšre. You are the same, not real but an object of pleasure.” 🔗

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PorcĂ©pic sat on the piano, and they sang revolutionary songs. “PorcĂ©pic,” grinned the tailor, “you’ll be surprised one day. At what we will do.”
“Nothing surprises me,” answered PorcĂ©pic. “If history were cyclical, we’d now be in a decadence, would we not, and your projected Revolution only another symptom of it.”
“A decadence is a falling-away,” said Kholsky. “We rise.”
“A decadence,” Itague put in, “is a falling-away from what is human, and the further we fall the less human we become. Because we are less human, we foist off the humanity we have lost on inanimate objects and abstract theories.” 🔗

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“Your beliefs are non-human,” he said. “You talk of people as if they were point-clusters or curves on a graph.”
“So they are,” mused Kholsky, dreamy-eyed. “I, Satin, PorcĂ©pic may fall by the wayside. No matter. The Socialist Awareness grows, the tide is irresistible and irreversible. It is a bleak world we live in, M. Itague; atoms collide, brain cells fatigue, economies collapse and others rise to succeed them, all in accord with the basic rhythms of History. Perhaps she is a woman; women are a mystery to me. But her ways are at least measurable.”
“Rhythm,” snorted Itague, “as if you listened to the jittenngs and squeaks of a metaphysical bedspring.” The tailor laughed, delighted, like a great fierce child. Acoustics of the room gave his mirthfulness a sepulchral ring. The stage was empty. 🔗

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“No. No, it is merely being reflected. The girl functions as a mirror. You, that waiter, the chiffonnier in the next empty street she turns into: whoever happens to be standing in front of the mirror in the place of that wretched man. You will see the reflection of a ghost.”
“M. Itague, your late readings may have convinced you—”
“I said ghost,” Itague answered softly. “Its name is not l’Heuremaudit, or l’Heuremaudit is only one of its names. That ghost fills the walls of this cafĂ© and the streets of this district, perhaps every one of the world’s arrondissements breathes its substance. Cast in the image of what? Not God. Whatever potent spirit can mesmerize the gift of irreversible flight into a grown man and the gift of self-arousal into the eyes of a young girl, his name is unknown. Or if known then he is Yahweh and we are all Jews, for no one will ever speak it.” Which was strong talk for M. Itague. He read La Libre Parole, had stood among the crowds to spit at Captain Dreyfus.
The woman stood at their table, not waiting for them to rise, merely standing and looking as if she’d never waited for anything.
“Will you join us,” said Satin eagerly. Itague looked far to the south, at the hanging yellow cloud which hadn’t changed its shape.
She owned a dress shop in the rue du Quatre-Septembre. Wore tonight a Poiret-inspired evening dress of crepe Georgette the color of a Negro’s head, beaded all over, covered with a cerise tunic which was drawn in under her breasts, Empire style. A harem veil covered the lower part of her face and fastened behind to a tiny hat riotous with the plumage of equatorial birds. Fan with amber stick, ostrich feathers, silk tassel. Sand-colored stockings, clocked exquisitely on the calf. Two brilliant-studded tortoise-shell pins through her hair; silver mesh bag, high-buttoned kid shoes with patent leather at the toe and French heel.
Who knew her “soul,” Itague wondered, glancing sideways at the Russian. It was her clothes, her accessories, which determined her, fixed her among the mobs of tourist ladies and putains that filled the street. 🔗

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If we’ve not already guessed, “the woman” is, again, the lady V. of Stencil’s mad time-search. No one knew her name in Paris.
Not only was she V., however, but also V. in love. Herbert Stencil was willing to let the key to his conspiracy have a few of the human passions. Lesbianism, we are prone to think in this Freudian period of history, stems from self-love projected on to some other human object. If a girl gets to feeling narcissist, she will also sooner or later come upon the idea that women, the class she belongs to, are not so bad either. Such may have been the case with MĂ©lanie, though who could say: perhaps the spell of incest at Serre Chaude was an indication that her preferences merely lay outside the usual, exogamous-heterosexual pattern which prevailed in 1913.
But as for V.—V. in love—the hidden motives, if there were any, remained a mystery to all observers. Everyone connected with the production knew what was going on; but because intelligence of the affair remained inside a circle inclined toward sadism, sacrilege, endogamy and homosexuality anyway, there was little concern, and the two were let alone, like young lovers. MĂ©lanie showed up faithfully at all rehearsals and as long as the woman wasn’t enticing her away from the production—which, apparently, she had no intention of doing, being a patroness—Itague for one couldn’t have cared less. 🔗

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Speculation among the company was that a peculiar inversion had taken place: since an affair of this sort generally involves one dominant and one submissive, and it was clear which one was which, the woman should have appeared in the clothing of an aggressive male. PorcĂ©pic, to the amusement of all, produced at L’Ouganda one evening a chart of the possible combinations the two could be practicing. It came out to sixty-four different sets of roles, using the subheadings “dressed as,” “social role,” “sexual role.” They could both for example be dressed as males, both have dominant social roles and strive for dominance sexually. They could be dressed different-sexed and both be entirely passive, the game then being to trick the other into making an aggressive move. Or any of sixty-two other combinations. Perhaps, Satin suggested, there were also inanimate mechanical aids. This, it was agreed, would confuse the picture. At one point someone suggested that the woman might actually be a transvestite to begin with, which made things even more amusing. 🔗

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certain fetishes never have to be touched or handled at all, only seen, for there to be complete fulfillment. As for MĂ©lanie, her lover had provided her with mirrors, dozens of them. Mirrors with handles, with ornate frames, full-length and pocket mirrors came to adorn the loft wherever one turned to look. 🔗

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V. at the age of thirty-three (Stencil’s calculation) had found love at last in her peregrinations through (let us be honest) a world if not created then at least described to its fullest by Karl Baedeker of Leipzig. This is a curious country, populated only by a breed called “tourists.” Its landscape is one of inanimate monuments and buildings; near-inanimate barmen, taxi-drivers, bellhops, guides: there to do any bidding, to various degrees of efficiency, on receipt of the recommended baksheesh, pourboire, mancia, tip. More than this it is two-dimensional, as is the Street, as are the pages and maps of those little red handbooks. As long as the Cook’s, Travellers’ Clubs and banks are open, the Distribution of Time section followed scrupulously, the plumbing at the hotel in order (“No hotel,” writes Karl Baedeker, “can be recommended as first-class that is not satisfactory in its sanitary arrangements, which should include an abundant flush of water and a supply of proper toilette paper”), the tourist may wander anywhere in this coordinate system without fear. War never becomes more serious than a scuffle with a pickpocket, one of “the huge army . . . who are quick to recognize the stranger and skilful in taking advantage of his ignorance”; depression and prosperity are reflected only in the rate of exchange; politics are of course never discussed with the native population. Tourism thus is supranational, like the Catholic Church, and perhaps the most absolute communion we know on Earth: for be its members American, German, Italian, whatever, the Tour Eiffel, Pyramids, and Campanile all evoke identical responses from them; their Bible is clearly written and does not admit of private interpretation; they share the same landscapes, suffer the same inconveniences; live by the same pellucid time-scale. They are the Street’s own.
The lady V., one of them for so long, now suddenly found herself excommunicated; bounced unceremoniously into the null-time of human love, without having recognized the exact moment as any but when MĂ©lanie entered a side door to Le Nerf on PorcĂ©pic’s arm and time—for a while—ceased. 🔗

V. was one of these inanimates, but suddenly finds herself "bounced unceremoniously into the null-time of human love."

"Tourism thus is supranational, like the Catholic Church, and perhaps the most absolute communion we know on Earth: for be its members American, German, Italian, whatever, the Tour Eiffel, Pyramids, and Campanile all evoke identical responses from them;"

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His description of them is a well-composed and ageless still-life of love at one of its many extremes: V. on the pouf, watching MĂ©lanie on the bed; MĂ©lanie watching herself in the mirror; the mirror-image perhaps contemplating V. from time to time. No movement but a minimum friction. And yet one solution to a most ancient paradox of love: simultaneous sovereignty yet a fusing-together. Dominance and submissiveness didn’t apply; the pattern of three was symbiotic and mutual. V. needed her fetish, MĂ©lanie a mirror, temporary peace, another to watch her have pleasure. For such is the self-love of the young that a social aspect enters in: an adolescent girl whose existence is so visual observes in a mirror her double; the double becomes a voyeur. Frustration at not being able to fragment herself into an audience of enough only adds to her sexual excitement. She needs, it seems, a real voyeur to complete the illusion that her reflections are, in fact, this audience. With the addition of this other—multiplied also, perhaps, by mirrors—comes consummation: for the other is also her own double. She is like a woman who dresses only to be looked at and talked about by other women: their jealousy, whispered remarks, reluctant admiration are her own. They are she. 🔗

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As for V., she recognized—perhaps aware of her own progression toward inanimateness—the fetish of MĂ©lanie and the fetish of herself to be one. As all inanimate objects, to one victimized by them, are alike. It was a variation on the Porpentine theme, the Tristan-and-Iseult theme, indeed, according to some, the single melody, banal and exasperating, of all Romanticism since the Middle Ages: “the act of love and the act of death are one.” Dead at last, they would be one with the inanimate universe and with each other. Love-play until then thus becomes an impersonation of the inanimate, a transvestism not between sexes but between quick and dead; human and fetish. The clothing each wore was incidental. The hair shorn from MĂ©lanie’s head was incidental: only an obscure bit of private symbolism for the lady V.: perhaps, if she were in fact Victoria Wren, having to do with her time in the novitiate. 🔗

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But such was her rapture at MĂ©lanie’s having sought and found her own identity in her and in the mirror’s soulless gleam that she continued unaware, off-balanced by love; forgetting even that although the Distribution of Time here on pouf, bed and mirrors had been abandoned, their love was in its way only another version of tourism; for as tourists bring into the world as it has evolved part of another, and eventually create a parallel society of their own in every city, so the Kingdom of Death is served by fetish-constructions like V.’s, which represent a kind of infiltration. 🔗

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What would have been her reaction, had she known? Again, an ambiguity. It would have meant, ultimately, V.’s death: in a sudden establishment here, of the inanimate Kingdom, despite all efforts to prevent it. The smallest realization—at any step: Cairo, Florence, Paris—that she fitted into a larger scheme leading eventually to her personal destruction and she might have shied off, come to establish eventually so many controls over herself that she became—to Freudian, behaviorist, man of religion, no matter—a purely determined organism, an automaton, constructed, only quaintly, of human flesh. Or by contrast, might have reacted against the above, which we have come to call Puritan, by journeying even deeper into a fetish-country until she became entirely and in reality—not merely as a love-game with any MĂ©lanie—an inanimate object of desire. 🔗

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It was a tricky bit of choreography, Satin’s own. He’d got the idea from reading an account of an Indian massacre in America. While two of the other Mongolians held her, struggling and head shaven, Su Feng was impaled at the crotch on the point of the pole and slowly raised by the entire male part of the company, while the females lamented below. Suddenly one of the automaton handmaidens seemed to run amok, tossing itself about the stage. Satin moaned, gritted his teeth. “Damn the German,” he said, “it will distract.” The conception depended on Su Feng continuing her dance while impaled, all movement restricted to one point in space, an elevated point, a focus, a climax.
The pole was now erect, the music four bars from the end. A terrible hush fell over the audience, gendarmes and combatants all turned as if magnetized to watch the stage. La JarretiĂšre’s movements became more spastic, agonized: the expression on the normally dead face was one which would disturb for years the dreams of those in the front rows. PorcĂ©pic’s music was now almost deafening: all tonal location had been lost, notes screamed out simultaneous and random like fragments of a bomb: winds, strings, brass and percussion were indistinguishable as blood ran down the pole, the impaled girl went limp, the last chord blasted out, filled the theater, echoed, hung, subsided. Someone cut all the stage lights, someone else ran to close the curtain.
It never opened. MĂ©lanie was supposed to have worn a protective metal device, a species of chastity belt, into which the point of the pole fit. She had left it off. 🔗

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chapter fifteen
Sahha 🔗

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a coin-operated whorehouse for bus and railway stations 🔗

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The next Profane knew they were all back in Flip and Flop’s apartment, his head in Flip’s lap and Pat Boone on the turntable. “You have the same initials,” Flop cooed from across the room. “Pat Boone, Pig Bodine.” Profane arose, stumbled to the kitchen and vomited in the sink.
“Out,” screamed Flip.
“Indeed,” said Profane. At the bottom of the stairs were two bicycles, which the girls rode to work to save bus fare. Profane grabbed one and carried it down the stoop to the street. A mess—fly unzipped, crew cut matted down both sides of his head, beard let go for two days, holed skivvy shirt pushed by his beer belly through a few open buttons on his shirt—he pedaled away wobbly for the flop-house.
He hadn’t gone two blocks when there were yells behind him. It was Pig on the other bike, chasing him with Flop on the handlebars. Far behind was Flip, on foot.
“Oh-oh,” said Profane. He fiddled with the gears, and promptly dropped into low.
“Thief,” yelled Pig, laughing his obscene laugh. “Thief.” A prowl car materialized out of nowhere and moved in to intercept Profane. Profane finally got the bike in high and whizzed round a corner. Thus they chased about the city, in fall’s cold, in a Sunday street deserted except for them. The cops and Pig finally caught up.
“It’s all right officer,” said Pig. “He’s a friend, I won’t press charges.”
“Fine,” said the cop. “I will.” They were hauled down to the precinct and put in the drunk tank. 🔗

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Kilroy, thus:
🔗

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Of their dash across the Continent in a stolen Renault; Profane’s one-night sojourn in a jail near Genoa, when the police mistook him for an American gangster; the drunk they all threw which began in Liguria and lasted well past Naples; the dropped transmission at the outskirts of that city and the week they spent waiting its repair in a ruined villa on Ischia, inhabited by friends of Stencil—a monk long defrocked named Fenice who spent his time breeding giant scorpions in marble cages once used by the Roman blood to punish their young boy and girl concubines, and the poet Cinoglossa who had the misfortune to be both homosexual and epileptic—wandering listlessly in an unseasonable heat among vistas of marble fractured by earthquake, pines blasted by lightning, sea wrinkled by a dying mistral; of their arrival in Sicily and the difficulty with local bandits on a mountain road (from which Stencil extricated them by telling foul Sicilian jokes and giving them whiskey); of the day-long trip from Syracuse to Valletta on the Laferla steamer Star of Malta, during which Stencil lost one hundred dollars and a pair of cufflinks at stud poker to a mild-faced clergyman who called himself Robin Petitpoint; and of Paola’s steadfast silence through it all, there was little for any of them to remember. Malta alone drew them, a clenched fist around a yo-yo string. 🔗

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A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsciously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: “Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.” It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved on it each time, placing emphasis on different words—“events seem”; “seem to be ordered”; “ominous logic”—pronouncing them differently, changing the “tone of voice” from sepulchral to jaunty: round and round and round. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic. He found paper and pencil and began to write the sentence in varying hands and type faces. 🔗

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“V.’s is a country of coincidence, ruled by a ministry of myth. Whose emissaries haunt this century’s streets. PorcĂ©pic, Mondaugen, Stencil pĂšre, this Maijstral, Stencil fils. Could any of them create a coincidence? Only Providence creates. If the coincidences are real then Stencil has never encountered history at all, but something far more appalling. 🔗

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“No,” Maijstral said, “you wouldn’t get what you wanted. What—if it were your world—would be necessary. One would have to exorcise the city, the island, every ship’s crew on that Mediterranean. The continents, the world. Or the Western part,” as an afterthought. “We are Western men.” 🔗

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some of us do go nowhere and can con ourselves into believing it to be somewhere: it is a kind of talent and objections to it are rare but even at that captious. 🔗

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Profane and Brenda continued to run through the abruptly absolute night, momentum alone carrying them toward the edge of Malta, and the Mediterranean beyond. 🔗

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epilogue
1919 🔗

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Astarte 🔗

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Armistice, ha 🔗

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“Which way does it go? As a youth I believed in social progress because I saw chances for personal progress of my own. Today, at age sixty, having gone as far as I’m about to go, I see nothing but a dead end for myself, and if you’re right, for my society as well. But then: suppose Sidney Stencil has remained constant after all—suppose instead sometime between 1859 and 1919, the world contracted a disease which no one ever took the trouble to diagnose because the symptoms were too subtle—blending in with the events of history, no different one by one but altogether—fatal. This is how the public, you know, see the late war. As a new and rare disease which has now been cured and conquered forever.”
“Is old age a disease?” Mehemet asked. “The body slows down, machines wear out, planets falter and loop, sun and stars gutter and smoke. Why say a disease? Only to bring it down to a size you can look at and feel comfortable?”
“Because we do paint the side of some Peri or other, don’t we. We call it society. A new coat of paint; don’t you see? She can’t change her own color.”
“No more than the pustules of smallpox have anything to do with death. A new complexion, a new coat of paint.”
“Of course,” said Stencil, thinking of something else, “of course we would all prefer to die of old age. . . .” 🔗

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atavistic 🔗

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“If there is any political moral to be found in this world,” Stencil once wrote in his journal, “it is that we carry on the business of this century with an intolerable double vision. Right and Left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets by manipulated mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.
“What of the real present, the men-of-no-politics, the once-respectable Golden Mean? Obsolete; in any case, lost sight of. In a West of such extremes we can expect, at the very least, a highly ‘alienated’ populace within not many more years.” 🔗

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He had changed none of his ideas on The Situation. Had even written an article, pseudonymous, and sent it to Punch: “The Situation as an N-Dimensional Mishmash.” It was rejected. 🔗

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He indeed was visited by dreams in which he had shrunk to submicroscopic size and entered a brain, strolling in through some forehead’s pore and into the cul-de-sac of a sweat gland. Struggling out of a jungle of capillaries there he would finally reach bone; down then through the skull, dura mater, arachnoid, pia mater to the fissure-floored sea of cerebrospinal fluid. And there he would float before final assault on the gray hemispheres: the soul. 🔗

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So at peace was Valletta that with the least distance she would deteriorate to mere spectacle. She ceased to exist as anything quick or pulsed, and was assumed again into the textual stillness of her own history. 🔗

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As the day progressed small bands of agitators, most of them with a holiday air (as if rioting were a healthy avocation like handicrafts or outdoor sports), roamed the streets, breaking windows, wrecking furniture, yelling at the merchants still open to close up their shops. But for some reason a spark was missing. Rain swept by in squalls at intervals throughout the day.
“Grasp this moment,” Demivolt said, “hold it close, examine it, treasure it. It is one of those rare occasions on which advance intelligence has proved to be correct.”
True: no one had been particularly excited. But Stencil wondered about that missing catalyst. Any minor accident: a break in the clouds, a catastrophic shivering at the first tentative blow to a shop window, the topology of an object of destruction (up a hill or down—it makes a difference)—anything might swell a merely mischievous humor to suddenly apocalyptic rage.
But all that came from the meeting was adoption of Mizzi’s resolution calling for complete independence from Great Britain. 🔗

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Don’t act as if it were a conscious plot against you. Who knows how many thousand accidents—a variation in the weather, the availability of a ship, the failure of a crop—brought all these people, with their separate dreams and worries, here to this island and arranged them into this alignment? Any Situation takes shape from events much lower than the merely human. 🔗

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Riding out to the villa in her Benz, he showed none of the usual automobile-anxieties. What use? They’d come in, hadn’t they, from their thousand separate streets. To enter, hand in hand, the hothouse of a Florentine spring once again; to be fayed and filleted hermetically into a square (interior? exterior?) where all art objects hover between inertia and waking, all shadows lengthen imperceptibly though night never falls, a total nostalgic hush rests on the heart’s landscape. And all faces are blank masks; and spring is any drawn-out sense of exhaustion or a summer which like evening never comes. 🔗

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The street and the hothouse; in V. were resolved, by some magic, the two extremes. She frightened him. 🔗

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Veronica was kind. Her time with Stencil was entirely for him. No appointments, whispered conferences, hurried paper work: only resumption of their hothouse-time—as if it were marked by any old and over precious clock which could be wound and set at will. For it came to that, finally: an alienation from time, much as Malta itself was alienated from any history in which cause precedes effect. 🔗

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Early on the morning of 10 June 1919, Mehemet’s xebec set sail from Lascaris Wharf. Seated on its counter, like some obsolete nautical fixture, was Sidney Stencil. No one had come to see him off. Veronica Manganese had kept him only as long as she had to. His eyes kept dead astern.
But as the xebec was passing Fort St. Elmo or thereabouts, a shining Benz was observed to pull up near the wharf and a black-liveried driver with a mutilated face to come to the Harbour’s edge and gaze out at the ship. After a moment he raised his hand; waved with a curiously sentimental, feminine motion of the wrist. He called something in English, which none of the observers understood. He was crying.
Draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa. Call it a radius. Somewhere in that circle, on the evening of the tenth, a water-spout appeared and lasted for fifteen minutes. Long enough to lift the xebec fifty feet, whirling and creaking, Astarte’s throat naked to the cloudless weather, and slam it down again into a piece of the Mediterranean whose subsequent surface phenomena—whitecaps, kelp islands, any of a million flatnesses which should catch thereafter part of the brute sun’s spectrum—showed nothing at all of what came to lie beneath, that quiet June day. 🔗