The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Read online

  ‘I had a change of orders,’ he explained. ‘Got to look after you. Got to see you get there safe and sound. She came herself and told me.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘The she of she’s. His daughter.’

  ‘Albertina?’

  I had never spoken the name aloud before.

  ‘You’re smart,’ he applauded. ‘Oh, you know the nature of plus all right’.

  ‘I can,’ I said, ‘put two and two together.’

  ‘Where’ve you been since you did for poor Mary Anne?’ But he leered and grimaced as he spoke so I knew he knew I knew he knew I had not, in fact, murdered the unfortunate girl but that, for some reason, I was now forced to pretend that I had. However, I was too tired to continue with such Byzantine perplexities.

  ‘Hiding,’ I said briefly.

  ‘They thought you’d most likely try to find me sooner or later, if you were still alive, that is.’

  He tested the temperature of the coffee with his thumb.

  ‘Seeing,’ he added with a certain smugness, ‘that I’m your only clue.’

  So he gave me back my quest but I could not think about it yet. I ate his food and let him wrap a blanket round me for I had taken a violent chill and, no matter how closely I hugged the stove, my teeth would not stop chattering.

  ‘You mustn’t get sick, you know,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a goodish long trip before we get there.’

  ‘I’m to go with you, am I?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m to give you a job as my assistant and also identification: to wit, my nephew. You’ll drive my little new old truck for me and put up the tent for me and oil the machines for me and so on, for I am getting on in years and not so active as I was.’

  ‘How long will it take to reach there?’

  ‘Oh, there’ll be ample time,’ he said. ‘He’s coped wonderfully with time, hasn’t he. Worried about your city, are you?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ I confessed.

  ‘He could probably use a smart young man like you in his organization.’

  He gave me a mug of hot coffee and I warmed my hands on it.

  ‘But I do have my own orders, you know.’

  My tongue tripped on the standard speech and, as I had become aware of positive happiness among the river people for the first time in my life, now I knew at last the flavour of true misery for I would never speak their musical tongue again. The old man cocked his head inquisitively and I waited for him to ask me where I had been hiding but he was attending only to what I said, not the manner in which I said it.

  ‘Licensed to kill?’ he queried.

  ‘What is your precise relationship to Dr Hoffman?’ I parried.

  He motioned me to pass him the mug and took some bitter sips before he replied. When he did so, his voice had lost something of its querulous senescence, so that I wondered to what extent he covered an authentic role in the Doctor’s play with that of an embittered old sot.

  ‘I am not necessarily connected with him,’ he said. ‘There are no such things as necessary connections. Necessary connections are fabulous beasts. Like the unicorn. Nevertheless, since things occasionally do come together in various mutable combinations, you might say that the Doctor and I have made a random intersection. He remembered me in my blindness. I was blind and old and had half drunk myself to death. He remembered me and he saved me. He even made me the curator of his museum.’

  There was a note of quiet pride in his voice that did not suit the rotting old hut in which we sat and bed of straw on which he slept so I knew he was of more importance than he seemed and the Minister’s computers had known what they were about when they put me on his trail.

  ‘His museum?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘The sack… behind you. Look.’

  The sack was immensely heavy and contained innumerable small boxes each marked on the lid with an indented device so that the old man in his blindness could inform himself of their contents by a single touch. Each one of these boxes contained, as I expected, the models, slides and pictures which went inside the machines and were there magnified by lenses almost to life-size. A universality of figures of men, women, beasts, drawing rooms, auto-da-fés and scenes of every conceivable type was contained in these boxes, none of which was bigger than my thumb. I spilled out a mass of variegated objects on my lap, each a wonder of miniaturization and some of scarcely credible complexity.

  ‘The set of samples,’ he explained. He was beginning to address me as if I were a lecture theatre. As I watched them, they seemed to wriggle and writhe over my knees with the force of the life they simulated but I knew it was only a trick of the vague light from the oil stove.

  ‘I am proud to say he was my pupil,’ said the peep-show proprietor. ‘If I feel a little resentment against him from time to time, when my bones ache with the travelling – well, it is only to be expected. I wasn’t even his John the Baptist, you know. I queried his doctoral thesis. I mocked his friend, Mendoza. Yet he trusts me with his set of samples.’

  He leaned over and plucked out a handful of figures.

  ‘Look at them. Do they look like toys?’

  ‘Yes. Like toys.’

  ‘They are symbolic constituents of representations of the basic constituents of the universe. If they are properly arranged, all the possible situations in the world and every possible mutation of those situations can be represented.’

  ‘Like the Minister’s computer bank?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ he snapped. ‘By the correct use of these samples, it would be possible to negate the reality of the Minister of Determination. Ironically enough, your Minister seeks the same final analysis my former pupil made long ago. But then the Doctor transcended it.’

  He held out a bouquet of ferocious images of desire in my direction. They seemed almost to leap from his hand, such was their synthetic energy.

  ‘The symbols serve as patterns or templates from which physical objects and real events may be evolved by the process he calls “effective evolving”. I go about the world like Santa with a sack and nobody knows it is filled up with changes.’

  I poured myself more coffee for I needed to keep my wits about me. After all, he had once been a rationalist even if now he were a charlatan.

  ‘I am very confused,’ I said. ‘Give me at least a hint of his methodology.’

  ‘First theory of Phenomenal Dynamics,’ he said. ‘The universe has no fixed substratum of fixed substances and its only reality lies in its phenomena.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I comprehend that.’

  ‘Second theory of Phenomenal Dynamics: only change is invariable.’

  This sounded more like an aphorism than a hypothesis to me but I held my peace.

  ‘Third theory of Phenomenal Dynamics: the difference between a symbol and an object is quantitative, not qualitative.’

  Then he sighed and fell silent. I saw through a rent in the canvas wall that though it was still night inside the booth, the dawn began in violet outside; and then I fell asleep.

  Now I was in hiding from both the police – for my picture with a WANTED sign was posted outside the town police station – and also from the river people. I passed myself off as the peep-show proprietor’s renegade nephew. My new identity was perfect in every detail. I tailored my hair and moustache to new shapes and threw away my Indian clothes, putting on instead some dark, sober garments which came with my new identity. I guessed that in the Minister’s reckoning I was listed dead, among the casualties of the war, and that was why Dr Hoffman was taking such pains over me but all I had to do was to hide in the shadows of the booth, polish the lenses of the machines, watch my master arrange each day’s fresh, disquieting spectacles and listen to the various accounts of his former pupil’s activities that he gave me in the evenings as we sat beside the stove after our business was done for the day.

  I was not competent, then, to comment on any of the information I received and I am not competent to do so now, even though I have seen the l
aboratories themselves, the generators and even the inscrutable doctor himself, at work among them with the awful conviction of a demiurge. But from the notes I made at the time, I extracted the following unlikely hints as to the intellectual principles underpinning the Doctor’s manifestations.

  His main principles were indeed as follows: everything it is possible to imagine can also exist. A vast encylopedia of mythological references supported this initial hypothesis – shamans of Oceania who sang rude blocks of wood ship-shape without the intervention of an axe; poets of medieval Ireland whose withering odes scalded their kings’ enemies with plagues of boils; and so on and so forth. At a very early point in his studies Hoffman had moved well out of the realm of pure science and resurrected all manner of antique pseudo-sciences, alchemy, geomancy and the empirical investigation of those essences the ancient Chinese claimed created phenomena through an interplay of elemental aspects of maleness and femaleness. And then there was the notion of passion.

  In the pocket of my dark suit I found a scrap of paper with the following quotation from de Sade written on it in the most exquisite, feminine handwriting; though the message was undirected and unsigned, I knew it was meant for me and that it came from Albertina.

  ‘My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass; they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.’

  Yet I could see no personal significance in these words and finally decided they must refer to the machinery of the peep-show itself for I had even begun to believe that the manipulation of those numinous samples might indeed restructure events since, in a poetic and circuitous fashion, they had certainly helped to organize my disastrous night at the Mayor’s house.

  But I was wistfully impressed by the grandiloquence of both de Sade and the girl who quoted him to me for I knew myself to be a man without much passion, even if I was a romantic. If I once again existed only in the vague hope I would one day see Albertina herself again, I could not imagine this desire might make me incandescent enough to glimpse her whereabouts by my own glow – let alone to utilize what my instructor in hyperphysics described to me as the ‘radiant energy’ which emanated from desire to blaze a path to her. A blind old man, playing with toys in a fairground, lost in a mazy web of memories of things he had not seen… it was a case of the blind leading the blind, for he could never have been a man who burned with passion himself, either! So when he spoke of Albertina as if she were lambent flame made flesh, his words rang curiously false, although I could remember my dream of the inextinguishable skeleton and wonder if she had visited him in a dream, too, for he could only see when he was asleep.

  He had formed a loose attachment with the fairground people and so the old man, the carnival and I travelled on together. I found that the peep-show proprietor, anticipating my arrival, had rented a broken-down truck from the Armenian who operated the wheel of fortune. This was his new little old truck and I drove it for him as we moved with our new companions from place to place, part of a tumultuous cavalcade moving towards other towns along the winter roads. On the road I was as safe from the Indians as I had been from the police while I lived on the river. I was as safe from everything as I would have been in the Opera House, listening to The Marriage of Figaro, because the road was another kind of self-consistent river.

  The travelling fair was its own world, which acknowledged no geographical location or temporal situation for everywhere we halted was exactly the same as where we had stopped last, once we had put up our booths and sideshows. Mexican comedians; intrepid equestriennes from Nebraska, Kansas or Ohio whose endless legs and scrubbed features were labelled ‘Made in U.S.A.’; Japanese dwarfs who wrestled together in arenas of mud; Norwegian motor-cyclists roaring vertically around portable walls of death; a team of dancing Albinos whose pallid gavottes were like those of the luminous undead; the bearded lady and the alligator man – these were my new neighbours, who shared nothing but the sullen glamour of their difference from the common world and clung defensively together to protect and perpetuate this difference. Natives of the fairground, they acknowledged no other nationality and could imagine no other home. A polyglot babel manned the sideshows, the rifle ranges and coconut shies, dive-bombers, helter-skelters and roundabouts on which, hieratic as knights in chess, the painted horses described perpetual circles as immune as those of the planets to the drab world of the here and now inhabited by those who came to gape at us. And if we transcended the commonplace, so we transcended language. Since we had few tongues in common, we mostly used a language of grunt, bark and gesture which is, perhaps, the common matrix of language. And as we rarely had anything more complicated to say to one another than how miry the roads were, we all got on well enough.

  They were not in the least aware how extraordinary they were because they made their living out of the grotesque. Their bread was deformity. Their biographies, however tragic or bizarre, were all alike in singularity and many of them, like myself, were permanently in hiding from a real world which they understood so badly nobody knew how much it had changed since the war began. Sometimes I thought the whole savage and dissolute crew were nothing but the Doctor’s storm troops but they did not know anything at all about the Doctor. Nobody had heard his name. They only knew a little about themselves and this knowledge, in itself, was quite sufficient to create a microcosm with as gaudy, circumscribed, rotary and absurd a structure as a roundabout.

  I often watched the roundabouts circulate upon their static journeys. ‘Nothing,’ said the peep-show proprietor, ‘is ever completed; it only changes.’ As he pleased, he altered the displays he had never seen, murmuring: ‘No hidden unity.’ The children of the fairground pressed their snot and filth-caked faces to the eyepieces and giggled at what they saw. Nothing was strange to those whose fathers rode the wall of death three times a day while their mothers elegantly defined gravity on a taut, single leg atop the white back of a pirouetting horse. And they seemed to see so little of their parents they might have been spontaneously generated by the evanescent paraphernalia of the passing show around them which, no sooner had it been set up, was dismantled, piled up in segments on erratic trucks and shifted in its entirety to some other new venue. The fairground was a moving toyshop, an ambulant raree-show coming to life in convulsive fits and starts whenever the procession stopped, regulated only by the implicit awareness of a lack of rules.

  ‘First will come Nebulous Time, a period of absolute mutability when only reflected rays and broken trajectories of an entirely hypothetical source of light fitfully reveal a continually shifting surface, like the surface of water, yet a water which is only a reflective skin and has neither depth nor volume. But you must never forget that the Doctor’s philosophy is not so much transcendental as incidental. It utilizes all the incidents that ripple the depthless surfaces of, you understand, the sensual world. When the sensual world unconditionally surrenders to the intermittency of mutability, man will be freed in perpetuity from the tyranny of a single present. And we will live on as many layers of consciousness as we can, all at the same time. After the Doctor liberates us, that is. Only after that.’

  The toasting cheese sweated a few drops of grease on to the flame in the stove so that it flared and stank. I filled the glass he held out to me, watching as I did so the reflected flame splutter on the cracked lenses of his dark glasses. Sometimes he looked like an old, blind evangelist. As he grew more used to having once again an audience, he ordered his periods more and more succinctly and phrased his lecturettes with more resonance. He started to impress me not so much with the quality of his discourse as with the awed wonder with which he delivered it. He often combined prophetic fervour with sibylline obscurity. Since I always got up before him in the mornings, sometimes I caught sight of him waking up. It was always poignant to watch him open his sightless eyes and blink a little as if this time there might be a chance he would blink away the darkness forever.

  Thrust as I
was into such intimacy with the peep-show proprietor, I could not help beginning to feel affection for him and I found myself ministering to the needs of an occasionally incontinent, always foul-mannered old man with a generosity I would never have expected of myself, though he made few demands upon me and those were mostly upon my attention.

  My tasks were simple and housewifely, for he did not allow me to meddle with the set of samples. I assembled our meals, swept out the booth, shook out our sleeping straw, dusted the machines and, behind a spare pair of discreet sunglasses, sat at the counter during his frequent absences in bars, for his drunkenness was real enough. Then I would make notes of the things he told me and try to tease out from them some notion of the practical means by which his former pupil performed his conjuring tricks, though this was a very difficult task for the essence of the Hoffman theory was the fluidity of its structure and, besides, I was constantly interrupted by visits from the roving packs of children and their elders also.

  A clatter of scales announced the arrival of homo reptilis for a bleak chat and several of my cigarettes, a whiff of gunpowder and imported perfume, that of Mamie Buckskin the sharp-shooter, while a more fragile and tentative clearing of the throat told me Madame la Barbe was here. Madame la Barbe kept her chestnut moustache to neat, discreet, Vermeer proportions and it disguised an uncommonly maternal nature. She would bring me a brioche freshly baked in the oven she had installed in her French provincial caravan full of plants in pots, pet cats, over-upholstered sofas and framed photographs of kin. On the frames of those of her relatives who were deceased she hung rosettes of black ribbons.

  I must admit that all my guests enchanted me and I, in turn, enchanted them for, here, I had the unique allure of the norm. I was exotic precisely to the extent of my mundanity. The peep-show proprietor’s nephew was a small businessman bankrupted by the catastrophe in the capital and all those freaks could not get enough of my accounts of the world of typewriters and telephones, flush toilets, tiled bathrooms, electric lights and mechanical appliances. They wondered at the masterpiece of sterility I remembered for them as if it were an earthly paradise from which they were barred forever. So I gave them an imitation of another reality while the peep-show proprietor offered me far stronger meat.