The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Read online

  The sense of space was powerfully affected so that sometimes the proportions of buildings and townscapes swelled to enormous, ominous sizes or repeated themselves over and over again in a fretting infinity. But this was much less disturbing than the actual objects which filled these gigantesque perspectives. Often, in the vaulted architraves of railway stations, women in states of pearly, heroic nudity, their hair elaborately coiffed in the stately chignons of the fin de siècle, might be seen parading beneath their parasols as serenely as if they had been in the Bois de Boulogne, pausing now and then to stroke, with the judiciously appraising touch of owners of race-horses, the side of steaming engines which did not run any more. And the very birds of the air seemed possessed by devils. Some grew to the size and acquired the temperament of winged jaguars. Fanged sparrows plucked out the eyes of little children. Snarling flocks of starlings swooped down upon some starving wretch picking over a mess of dreams and refuse in a gutter and tore what remained of his flesh from his bones. The pigeons lolloped from illusory pediment to window-ledge like volatile, feathered madmen, chattering vile rhymes and laughing in hoarse, throaty voices, or perched upon chimney stacks shouting quotations from Hegel. But often, in actual mid-air, the birds would forget the techniques and mechanics of the very act of flight and then they fell down, so that every morning dead birds lay in drifts on the pavements like autumn leaves or brown, wind-blown snow. Sometimes the river ran backwards and crazy fish jumped out to flop upon the sidewalks and wriggle around on their bellies for a while until they died, choking for lack of water. It was, too, the heyday of trompe l’œil for painted forms took advantage of the liveliness they mimicked. Horses from the pictures of Stubbs in the Municipal Art Gallery neighed, tossed their manes and stepped delicately off their canvases to go to crop the grass in public parks. A plump Bacchus wearing only a few grapes strayed from a Titian into a bar and there instituted Dionysiac revelry.

  But only a few of the transmutations were lyrical. Frequently, imaginary massacres filled the gutters with blood and, besides, the cumulative psychological effect of all these distortions, combined with the dislocation of everyday life and the hardship and privations we began to suffer, created a deep-seated anxiety and a sense of profound melancholy. It seemed each one of us was trapped in some downward-drooping convoluted spiral of unreality from which we could never escape. Many committed suicide.

  Trade was at an end. All the factories closed down and there was wholesale unemployment. There was always the smell of dissolution in the air for the public services were utterly disorganized. Typhoid took a heavy toll and there were grim murmurs of cholera or worse. The only form of transport the Minister permitted in the city was the bicycle, since it can only be ridden by that constant effort of will which precludes the imagination. The Determination Police enforced a strict system of rationing in an attempt to eke out the city’s dwindling supplies of food as long as possible but the citizens lied freely about their needs and those of their dependants, broke into shops to steal and gleefully submitted to the authorities the forged bread tickets with which Dr Hoffman flooded the streets. After the Minister sealed off the city, our only news of the country outside the capital came from the terse, laconic reports of the Determination Police and the gossip of the few peasants who had the necessary credentials to pass the guards at the checkpoints with a basket or two of vegetables or some coops of chickens.

  Dr Hoffman had destroyed time and played games with the objects by which we regulated time. I often glanced at my watch only to find its hands had been replaced by a healthy growth of ivy or honey-suckle which, while I looked, writhed impudently all over its face, concealing it. Tricks with watches and clocks were pet devices of his, for so he rubbed home to us how we no longer held a structure of time in common. Inside the twin divisions of light and darkness there was no more segmentation, for what clocks were left all told a different time and nobody trusted them anyway. Past time occupied the city for whole days together, sometimes, so that the streets of a hundred years before were superimposed on nowadays streets and I made my way to the Bureau only by memory, along never-before-trodden lanes that looked as indestructible as earth itself and yet would vanish, presumably, whenever someone in Dr Hoffman’s entourage grew bored and pressed a switch.

  Statistics for burglary, arson, robbery with violence and rape rose to astronomical heights and it was not safe, either physically or metaphysically, to leave one’s room at night although one was not particularly safe if one stayed at home either. There had been two cases of suspected plague. By the beginning of the second year we received no news at all from the world outside for Dr Hoffman blocked all the radio waves. Slowly the city acquired a majestic solitude. There grew in it, or it grew into, a desolate beauty, the beauty of the hopeless, a beauty which caught the heart and made the tears come. One would never have believed it possible for this city to be beautiful.

  At certain times, especially in the evenings, as the shadows lengthened, the ripe sunlight of the day’s ending fell with a peculiar, suggestive heaviness, trapping the swooning buildings in a sweet, solid calm, as if preserving them in honey. Aurified by the Midas rays of the setting sun, the sky took on the appearance of a thin sheet of beaten gold like the ground of certain ancient paintings so the monolithically misshapen, depthless forms of the city took on the enhanced glamour of the totally artificial. Then, we – that is, those of us who retained some notion of what was real and what was not – felt the vertigo of those teetering on the edge of a magic precipice. We found ourselves holding our breath almost in expectancy, as though we might stand on the threshold of a great event, transfixed in the portentous moment of waiting, although inwardly we were perturbed since this new, awesome, orchestration of time and space which surrounded us might be only the overture to something else, to some most profoundly audacious of all these assaults against the things we had always known. The Minister was the only person I knew who claimed he did not, even once, experience this sense of immanence.

  The Minister had never in all his life felt the slightest quiver of empirical uncertainty. He was the hardest thing that ever existed and never the flicker of a mirage distorted for so much as a fleeting second the austere and intransigent objectivity of his face even though, as I saw it, his work consisted essentially in setting a limit to thought, for Dr Hoffman appeared to me to be proliferating his weaponry of images along the obscure and controversial borderline between the thinkable and the unthinkable.

  ‘Very well,’ said the Minister. ‘The Doctor has invented a virus which causes a cancer of the mind, so that the cells of the imagination run wild. And we must – we will! – discover the antidote.’

  But he still had no idea how the Doctor had done it although it was clear that day by day he was growing better at it. So the Minister, who had not one shred of superstition in him, was forced to become an exorcist for all he could do was to try to scare the spooks off the bedevilled streets and although he had a battery of technological devices to help him, in the last resort he was reduced to the methods of the medieval witch-hunter. I rarely had the stomach to pass Reality Testing Laboratory C for the smell of roast pork nauseated me and I wondered if the Minister, out of desperation, intended to rewrite the Cartesian cogito thus: ‘I am in pain, therefore I exist,’ and base his tests upon it for, in cases of stubborn and extreme confusion, they operated a trial by fire. If it emerged alive from the incineration room, it was obviously unreal and, if he had been reduced to a handful of ash, he had been authentic. By the end of the second year, most other expedients – the radar and so on – were proving fallible, anyway. The Determination Police claimed the Incineration Room had carbonized a number of Hoffman’s agents but, as for myself, I was suspicious of the Determination Police for their ankle-length, truculently belted coats of black leather, their low-crowned, wide-brimmed fedoras and their altogether too highly polished boots woke in me an uncomfortable progression of associations. They looked as if they had been recruited wh
olesale from a Jewish nightmare.

  In the early days of the war the first counter-weapon we devised was the Determining Radar Apparatus, which was both offensive and defensive as it incorporated a laser effect in its beam. The Determining Radar Apparatus worked on the theory that non-solid substance which could, however, be recognized by the senses had a molecular structure which bristled with projections. The model of the unreality atom in the Minister’s office consisted of a tetrahydron improvised out of a number of hairbrushes. The radar beams were supposed to bruise themselves on this bed of thorns and certainly let out an inaudible shriek instantly visible on the screens at H.Q. This shriek automatically triggered the laser and at once annihilated the offending non-substance. For a time, during the last half of the first year, the Minister wore a faint smile for daily we disintegrated whole battalions of eldritch guerrillas but the Doctor’s research laboratories must have swiftly restructured their own prototype molecule for, by Christmas time, the screens at H.Q. were gradually falling silent, letting out only a few very occasional squeaks when a beam accidentally brushed the teeth of what was now patently an obsolete illusion probably only used as a decoy – such things, for example, as a man whose hat had become his head; while more and more outrageous spectacles danced and shouted in a city only intermittently recognizable. The Minister’s smile died. Our physicists, all of whom had a three-star reality rating and the patience of Job, finally turned out a new hypothetical model for this modification of the unreality atom. It was a sphere of looking glass, like a reflective tear, and the leader of the team, Dr Drosselmeier, explained to the Minister and myself how the molecules must fit together like a coalescence of raindrops.

  At this point, Dr Drosselmeier went mad. He did so without warning but most melodramatically. He blew up the physics laboratory, the records which contained the sum total of his researches, four of his assistants and himself. I do not think his breakdown was caused by some obscure machination of the Doctor, even though I was beginning to feel the Doctor was probably omnipotent; I suspect Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality and it had destroyed his reason. However, this disaster left us utterly defenceless and the Minister was forced to rely more and more on the primitive and increasingly brutal methods of the Determination Police while he himself supervised work on a project he believed would finally save us from the Doctor. When he spoke of this project, a guarded but Messianic gleam crept into his usually cool and sceptical eyes.

  He was in the process of constructing an immense computer centre which would formulate a systematic procedure for calculating the verifiable self-consistency of any given object. He believed the criterion of reality was that a thing was determinate and the identity of a thing lay only in the extent to which it resembled itself. He was the most ascetic of logicians but, if he had a fatal flaw, it was his touch of scholasticism. He believed that the city – which he took as a microcosm of the universe – contained a finite set of objects and a finite set of their combinations and therefore a list could be made of all possible distinct forms which were logically viable. These could be counted, organized into a conceptual framework and so form a kind of check list for the verification of all phenomena, instantly available by means of an information retrieval system. So he was engaged in the almost superhuman task of programming computers with factual data concerning every single thing which, as far as it was humanly possible to judge, had ever – even if only once and that momentarily – existed. Thus the existence of any object at all, however bizarre it might at first appear, could first be checked against the entire history of the world and then be given a possibility rating. Once a thing was registered as ‘possible’, however, there followed the infinitely more complex procedure designed to discover if it were probable.

  Sometimes he talked to me about politics. His political philosophy had the non-dynamic magnificence of contrapuntal, pre-classical music; he described to me a grooved, interlocking set of institutions governed by the notion of a great propriety. He called it his theory of ‘names and functions’. Each man was secure in possession of a certain name which also ensured him a certain position in a society seen as a series of interlinking rings which, although continually in movement, were never subjected to change for there were never any disturbances and no usurpation of names or ranks or roles whatsoever. And the city circled in this utterly harmonious fashion with the radiant serenity of a place in which everything was inevitable for, as soon as the death of a ruler completed one movement in this celestial concerto, the inauguration of another ruler signalled the start of another movement precisely similar in form. The Minister had a singular passion for Bach. He thought that Mozart was frivolous. He was as sombre and sedate as a mandarin.

  But although he was the most rational man in the world, he was only a witch-doctor in the present state of things, even if the spooks he was pledged to eradicate were not real spooks but phenomena perpetrated by a man who was probably the greatest physicist of all time. Yet, essentially, it was a battle between an encyclopedist and a poet for Hoffman, scientist as he was, utilized his formidable knowledge only to render the invisible visible, even though it certainly seemed to us that his ultimate plan was to rule the world.

  The Minister spent night after night among his computers. His face grew grey and drawn with overwork and his fine hands shook with fatigue and yet he remained indefatigable. But it seemed to me that he sought to cast the arbitrarily fine mesh of his predetermined net over nothing but a sea of mirages for he refused to acknowledge how palpable the phantoms were, how they could be seen and touched, kissed and eaten, penetrated and picked in bunches, to be arranged in a vase. The variegated raree-show which now surrounded us was as complicated as a real man himself, walking, but the Minister saw the entire spectacle as a corrugated surface of various greys, the colourless corpse of itself. Yet this limitation of his imagination gave him the capacity to see the city as an existential crossword puzzle which might one day be solved. I passed the days beside him, making innumerable pots of the tea he drank black, with neither lemon nor sugar, emptying his brimming ashtrays and changing the records of Bach and the pre-classicals he played softly all the time to aid his concentration. I was at the hub of things but still I was indifferent. My mother came to see me; my name fluctuated on my nameplate; my dreams were so amazing that, in spite of myself, I had become awe-struck at the approach of sleep. And yet I could summon up no interest in all this.

  I felt as if I was watching a film in which the Minister was the hero and the unseen Doctor certainly the villain; but it was an endless film and I found it boring for none of the characters engaged my sympathy, even if I admired them, and all the situations appeared the false engineering of an inefficient phantasist. But I had one curious, persistent hallucination which obscurely troubled me because nothing about it was familiar and, each time I saw her, she never changed. Every night as I lay on the borders of a sleep which had now become as aesthetically exhausting as Wagner, I would be visited by a young woman in a négligé made of a fabric the colour and texture of the petals of poppies which clung about her but did not conceal her quite transparent flesh, so that the exquisite filigree of her skeleton was revealed quite clearly. Where her heart should have been there flickered a knot of flames like ribbons and she shimmered a little, like the air on a very hot summer’s day. She did not speak; she did not smile. Except for those faint quiverings of her unimaginable substance, she did not move. But she never failed to visit me. Now I know that the manifestations of those days were – as perhaps I then suspected but refused to admit to myself – a language of signs which utterly bemused me because I could not read them. Each phantom was a symbol palpitating with appalling significance yet she alone, my visitor with flesh of glass, hinted to me a little of the nature of the mysteries which encompassed us and filled so many of us with terror.

  She stayed beside me until I slept, waveringly, brilliantly, hooded in diaphanous scarlet, and occasionally she left an
imperative written in lipstick on my dusty windowpane. BE AMOROUS! she exhorted one night and, another night, BE MYSTERIOUS! Some nights later, she scribbled: DON’T THINK, LOOK; and, shortly after that, she warned me: WHEN YOU BEGIN TO THINK, YOU LOSE THE POINT. These messages irritated yet haunted me. They itched away all day inside my head like a speck of dust trapped beneath my eyelids. She was qualitatively different from the comic apparition purporting to be my mother who perched on the mantel-piece in the guise of a fat, white owl begging my forgiveness and hooting her orisons. This visible skeleton, this miraculous bouquet of bone, the formal elements of physicality, was one of the third order of forms who might presently invade us, the order of angels, speaking lions and winged horses, the miraculous revenants for whom the city sometimes seemed hushed in expectation and who themselves would only be the amazing heralds of the arrival of the Emperor of the Marvellous, whose creatures we would by that time have all become.

  We knew the name of our adversary. We knew the date at which he graduated in physics with honours from the national university. We knew his father had been a gentleman banker who dabbled a little in the occult and his mother a lady who liked to organize soup kitchens in the slums and sewing schools for repentant prostitutes. We even discovered, to the Minister’s tactful embarrassment, that my own mother, during one of her atoning fits, had stitched for me at one of Mrs Hoffman’s schools a pathetically disintegrating flannel under-garment which I wore for a day before the seams unravelled altogether, an appropriate symbol for my mother’s repentance. I suppose this coincidence gave me a certain tenuous sense of involvement with the Hoffman family – as if, one rainy afternoon, I had talked with an aunt of his briefly about the weather, on a stopping, country train. We knew the very date, 18 September 1867, on which Dr Hoffman’s great-grandfather arrived in this country, a minor aristocrat of slender means fleeing from unmentionable troubles in a certain wolf-haunted mountainous Slavonic principality which was subsequently rendered into legislative non-being during the Franco–Prussian war or some such war. We knew that, when his son was born, the father cast his horoscope and then gave the midwife who had delivered him a tip of several thousand dollars. We knew the boy Hoffman had been involved in a homosexual scandal at his preparatory school and we even knew how much it had cost to hush the scandal up. The Minister devoted an entire bank of computers to data on Dr Hoffman. We even tabulated his childhood illnesses and the Minister found especially significant an attack of brain fever in his seventh year and a crise de nerfs in his sixteenth.