The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Page 29

  ‘My wife’s work,’ said Hoffman. ‘She is the poet of the family. In rough translation, our motto reads: “There is intercommunication of seed between male and female and all things are produced.” It is exceedingly apt.’

  I was totally unprepared for what I found inside those doors.

  The electricity of desire lit everything with chill, bewitching fire and the entire structure was roofed and walled with seamless looking-glass. The first technician I had seen in the laboratories sat at a steel desk, nodding over a pile of comic books. He was a beautiful hermaphrodite in an evening dress of purple gauze with silver sequins round his eyes.

  ‘I am a harmonious concatenation of male and female and so the Doctor gave me sole charge of the generators,’ he said in a voice like a sexual ’cello. ‘I was the most beautiful transvestite in all Greenwich Village before the Doctor gave me the post of intermediary. I represent the inherent symmetry of divergent asymmetry.’

  The Doctor caressed him affectionately on the shoulder. But the intermediary was a cripple and had to roll himself forward on a wheelchair to show us round the love pens.

  They were housed in a curving, narrow room some hundreds of yards long, an undulating tentacle extending into the very core of the mountain. All along the mirrored walls were three-tiered wire bunks. In the ceiling, above each tier of bunks, were copper extractors of a funnel type leading into an upper room where a good deal of invisible machinery roared with a sound like rushing water but the noise of the machinery was almost drowned by the moans, grunts, screams, bellowings and choked mutterings that rose from the occupants of those open coffins, for here were a hundred of the best-matched lovers in the world, twined in a hundred of the most fervent embraces passion could devise.

  They were all stark naked and very young. They came from every race in the world, brown, black, white and yellow, and were paired, as far as I could see, according to colour differences. They formed a pictorial lexicon of all the things a man and a woman might do together within the confines of a bed of wire six feet long by three feet wide. There was such a multitude of configurations of belly and buttock, thigh and breast, nipple and navel, all in continual motion, that I remembered the anatomy lessons of the acrobats of desire and how the Count had spoken, with uncharacteristic reverence, of the ‘death-defying double somersault of love’.

  I was awed and I was revolted.

  ‘They are paired in these mesh cubicles so that they can all see one another – if they bother to look, of course, and hear one another, if they can hear, that is; and so, if necessary, receive a constant refreshment from visual and audial stimuli,’ commented the irrepressibly efficient Doctor. The rubber wheels of the hermaphrodite’s chair squeaked a little on the mirrored floor as we walked slowly past the hutches. The polished walls and floor reflected and multiplied the visible propagation of eroto-energy as they had done that stormy night in the orchid-coloured caravan, when the Arab tumblers and I together must unwittingly have invoked a landslide. Our footsteps clinked. The Doctor tugged at the brown ringlets of a plump, dimpled, pink and white English rosebud straining beneath a diminutive but immensely tooled Mongolian; she did not even turn her head for she was poised on the verge of a ripping shriek as her apricot-skinned lover plunged down.

  ‘Look! They are so engrossed in their vital work they do not even notice us!’

  The hermaphrodite tittered sycophantically but she need not have worked so hard at her disguise. I suspected her already. I had seen her disguised far too often not to recognize her disguises.

  ‘We feed them hormones intravenously,’ the Doctor informed me.

  ‘Their plentiful secretions fall through the wire meshes into the trays underneath each tier, or dynamic set, of lovers and are gathered up three times a day by means of large sponges, so that nothing whatsoever is lost. And the energy they release – eroto-energy, the simplest yet most powerful form of radiant energy in the entire universe – rises up through these funnels into the generating chambers overhead.’

  And these were all the true acrobats of desire, whom the Moroccans had only exemplified.

  He sighed again and swallowed two aspirin, though there was no water-cooler in this laboratory so he had to chew them dry. The eyes of the hermaphrodite were the shape of tears laid on their sides and had the very colour of the tremendous clamour that rose from all those lovers caught perpetually in the trap of one another’s arms, for there were no locks or bars anywhere; they could have come and gone as they pleased. Yet, petrified pilgrims, locked parallels, icons of perpetual motion, they knew nothing but the progress of their static journey towards willed, mutual annihilation.

  ‘These lovers do not die,’ said Albertina. ‘They have transcended mortality.’

  ‘After an indefinite period of dimensionless time,’ amplified the Doctor wearily, ‘they resolve into two basic constituents – pure sex and pure energy. That is, fire and air. It is a grand explosion. And,’ he added with, I think, a faint wonder, ‘every single one of them volunteered.’

  Beneath the purple bosom of her ball gown, I saw an interior corsage of flame, her heart. We moved down the lines of pens, we and our reflections, he, and she, and I, until we came to the end of the line. It had taken us a quarter of an hour, walking at a good pace. And here, at the top of a tier, was an empty cubicle.

  As soon as I saw it, I knew it was my marriage bed.

  The time was ripe. My bride was waiting. We had her father’s blessing.

  ‘I shall go to the city tomorrow,’ said the Doctor, ‘and, since time will be altogether negated –’

  ‘– you will arrive yesterday,’ concluded Albertina. They both laughed gently. And now I understood this gnomic exchange perfectly. Our long-delayed but so greatly longed-for conjunction would spurt such a charge of energy our infinity would fill the world and, in this experiential void, the Doctor would descend on the city and his liberation would begin.

  She wiped the silver from her eyes and the purple dress dropped away from the goddess of the cornfields, more savagely and triumphantly beautiful than any imagining, my Platonic other, my necessary extinction, my dream made flesh.

  ‘No!’ I cried. ‘No, Generalissimo! No!’

  And I cried out so loudly I pierced even the willed oblivion of the love slaves for, as I ran past towards the door, they bucked and thrust less violently and one or two of them even moved their eyes as far as they could without moving their heads to watch me, such vacant eyes that slowly, painfully cleared as the sweat on their limbs dried. The light began to flicker a little, as though heralding a power failure.

  An alarum bell shrilled. The Doctor had a gun and sent a volley of bullets after me but my many reflections misled him and the bullets bounced back off the walls and caused great bloodshed among the woefully exposed practitioners of desire. I rattled the steel doors but they must have locked automatically when the alarum went off. So, weaponless, desperate, half-blinded by tears, I turned to face my adversaries.

  The Doctor had leapt into the wheelchair to propel himself more quickly down the long room, for he was slow on his feet. He was showing some emotion at last. His face was working and he gibbered with rage as he shook his useless, empty revolver. But she – she was like an avenging angel, because she truly loved me, and in her hand she held a knife that flashed in the white, trembling, artificial light. And all the naked lovers had abandoned their communion to lament their dead and the dying on whose beautiful flesh the bright blood blossomed.

  I had seen nothing in the peep-show to warn me of the grotesque dénouement of my great passion.

  He came straight at me in his wheelchair, intending to run me down, but I grasped the arms of the chair and overturned it. He was as weightless as a doll. He went limply sprawling and the revolver flew from his hand to spin over the glass and crash against the wall while his head cracked down at such an awkward angle I think his neck broke instantly. A little blood trickled down his nose to meet the flow that trickled upwards f
rom the nose in the mirror and then I was wrestling on top of his body with Albertina for the knife.

  We wrestled on her father’s flaccid corpse for possession of the knife as passionately as if for the possession of each other.

  And then we slithered like wet fish over the mirrors but still she would not let go of the knife though I clutched her wrist too tightly for her to be able to kill me with it. She bit me and tore my clothes and I bit her and pummelled her with my fists. I pummelled her breasts until they were as blue as her eyelids but she never let go and I savaged her throat with my teeth as if I were a tiger and she were the trophy I seized in the forests of the night. But she did not let go for a long, long time, not until all her strength was gone. At that, I killed her.

  It is very hard for me to write this down. And I have already told you how I killed the Doctor – that is, unintentionally. Do you not already know I do not deserve to be a hero? Why should I tell you how I killed Albertina? I think I killed her to stop her killing me. I think that was the case. I am almost sure it was the case. Almost certain.

  When her fingers slackened on the handle, I seized the knife immediately and stabbed her below the left nipple. Or perhaps it was in the belly. No, it was below the left nipple for the fire vanished as the steel entered the flames but she spoke to me before she died. She said: ‘I always knew one only died of love.’ Then she fell back from the blade of the knife. She must have hidden the knife in her purple dress though I will never know why, of course. It was a common kitchen knife, such as is used to chop meat fine enough for hamburger and so on. Her flesh parted to let the knife out and her eyes, though still the shape of horizontal tears, were silent forever.

  If the Doctor had been a real magician, the underground laboratory, the castle, the whole edifice of stone and stained glass and cloud and mist should have vanished. There should have been a crash of thunder and a strong wind would have blown away the levers and the machinery and the books and the alembics and the pickled mandrakes and the alligator skeletons; and I should have found myself alone on the mountain side, under a waning moon, with only the rags of dream in my hands. But no. The alarum bells continued to ring and some of the surviving lovers, rudely shaken from their embrace by the sound of gunfire, began to clamber from their sleepless dormitory on shaky legs, though they moved without sense or purpose, as if obeying some obscure compulsion to come closer to the spectacle of death, though none of them seemed to observe this spectacle for they still seemed half-blinded. And the one door remained remorselessly closed, while I was a mile beneath the crust of the earth, locked in a white-tiled hall of mirrors. Nevertheless, as I wiped the reeking blade on the handkerchief they had provided for my breast pocket, I felt, how can I put it? Yes; I felt the uneasy sense of perfect freedom. Freedom, yes. I thought I was free of her, you see.

  But there was no way out of the laboratory except the sealed door and how could I be free of her as long as I myself remained alive?

  I knew the alarum bell must rouse something and my first thought was, escape; my second, that escape was impossible. Those of the milling lovers who were not lamenting their dead or grieving over one another’s wounds were as witless and uncertain on their feet as new born colts. They knew only that they had been interrupted in the middle of the most important work in the world but neither how nor why and even those whose shattered faces streamed with blood clasped their partners’ arms or legs and begged them to lie down again while others, risen, tottering, befogged by mirrors, kissed the glass cases that seemed to hold such inviting lips. Yet few, if any, took any notice of me with my knife or had even seen how cruelly I had betrayed love itself. I hid myself among the wire hutches until the metal doors slid open. The alarum ceased.

  But no detachment of militia appeared, only a single, white-clad representative of the hitherto invisible technical staff, armed only with a syringe. And he did not even bother to close the door behind him. Clearly the alarum had always before only indicated some slight indisposition among the lovers that could easily be righted with a shot or two of extra hormones; perhaps they interpreted the flickering of the lights as the sign of a hormonal deficiency. How could anyone know the real nature of the disturbance? What riot might the lovers make? Why should they call out the guard to deal with a lowered vitality among the love slaves? Yet I had been prepared for fifty hired rifles to level against me. I wanted a heroic struggle. I wanted a heroic struggle to justify my murder to myself. And all I did in the end was to stab the harmless technician in the back of the neck as easily as you please while he gaped open-mouthed at the splintered wheelchair, the contorted savant and the dead girl. Leaving my bag of three stiffening behind me, I walked out into the corridor and pressed the button that closed the door behind me.

  If you feel a certain sense of anti-climax, how do you think I felt?

  I still carried my knife. I noticed I had unconsciously tucked that handkerchief stained with Albertina’s blood into my breast pocket, where it looked just like a red rose.

  But the lights were all going out and I knew the rest of the castle, whoever that comprised, would soon all be roused. First, I knew I must destroy the reality modifying machines; this was clearly fixed in my mind as though to wreck them would completely vindicate me – as, indeed, in the eyes of history, it has. I ran down that ice warren of white, glittering corridors, found the laboratory, went in, smashed the dancing screens with the desk, dragged pipes and wires from the walls and set fire to the papers with my gold cigarette lighter. It was the work of moments. To complete the job, I went into the distilling plant and smashed everything I found there, though first I surprised another technician and so I had to stab him, too. These depredations set off no alarums for, by the structure of the Doctor’s system, disturbances were impossible; but the lights were flickering so badly now, I knew I had not much longer at liberty in the castle and so would have to leave the workroom in the tower unharmed. But I guessed the Doctor only allowed his daughter to handle the most arcane secrets and so it proved, for everything stopped immediately as soon as he was dead, of course, and the love slaves disbanded, for concretized desires could not survive without their eroto-energy and… But I knew nothing of that. Those are the dreary ends of the plot. Shall I tie them up or shall I leave them unravelled? The history books tie them up far better than I can for I was deep in the bowels of the earth, was I not, with four notches on my knife. Oh, but I got out easily enough even though the elevator was no longer running. I found the emergency exit; it was beside the elevator. It spiralled me dizzily up to the hall of the castle, where the old dog still drowsed before the grey ashes of the applewood fire.

  When he smelled Albertina’s blood, he leapt at me with the last reserves of his senile strength and I left the kitchen knife in his throat. And so he was my last victim in the Doctor’s castle.

  In the beatific park, the birds now slept with peaceful heads tucked beneath their wings and the deer slept like statues of deer. One by one, the castle closed its coloured eyes behind me, like a peacock slowly furling in its spread, and its four attendant moons revolved more and more slowly and were already perceptibly fading round the edges, like the real moon towards the end of the night. And I, I was still in my dinner jacket with a black tie round my neck and a bloody buttonhole still stuck in my lapel as I fled across the dew-moistened grass as if I were an uninvited guest turned away from the door of a magnificent dinner party.

  I started to run. The wooden bridge sounded off like machine-gun fire under my running feet. I pulled up a dry bush from the edge of the cliff and lit a bonfire on the bridge with my gold cigarette lighter and I burned the bridge behind me, so I could not have gone back to the castle even if I wanted to. I only burned the bridge so that I would not be able to return to her. It broke and fell blazing into the abyss; the earth swallowed it.

  But now the sky filled with a locust swarm of helicopters all descending on to the roof of the dying castle and I thought the military were roused at last but t
hen I realized they must have arrived according to a pre-scheduled plan and had come to take the Doctor into the city.

  I was the only man alive under the stars who knew the Doctor was dead.

  I was the only man alive who knew time had begun again.

  The only road led to the air-strip and base so I did not follow any path. Once again I took to the mountains. I wandered among them for perhaps three days, hiding among the rocks when I sighted a roving helicopter overhead for they were buzzing all over the terrain like angry flies and I wondered if the militia might inherit the kingdom the Doctor had prepared for himself. On the third day, quite by accident, I found an Indian farmstead. When I spoke to them in the language of the river people, they took me in, gave me thin barley porridge and let me sleep on the common pallet. In return for my gold cigarette lighter they allowed me to ride away on a scrawny, white, starveling mare and the smallest son, in his baggy white drawers, with the open sores on his legs, came with me until I was safely on the track that took me winding down to the foothills through those cruel, yellow clefts that seared my weary brain with their infinite monotony. The helicopters monitored the white, abandoned skies less and less often; after all, the Doctor’s swarthy soldiers had only been mercenaries and when their pay was not forthcoming, after they tried but failed to make sense of the books, the instrument panels and the generators, they would gut the castle and go off in search of another war, for was there not always another war to be had? And the technicians were only technicians… but I knew nothing of this last phase of the war, its dying fall; I only knew the helicopters came less frequently and then did not come at all.