The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (38 page)

‘In this way, a synthetically authentic phenomenon finally takes shape. I used the capital city of this country as the testing ground for my first experiments because the unstable existential structure of its institutions could not suppress the latent consciousness as effectively as a structure with a firmer societal organization. I should have had very little success in, for example, Peking – in spite of the Chinese influence on my researches.

‘My wife,’ he added tangentially, ‘is a very brilliant woman.’

I thought of the corpse upstairs and shuddered.

‘I chose the capital only because it was so well suited to my experiments. I was rather put out when the times produced the Minister and the Minister produced his defences. I had thought there were no defences against the unleashed unconscious. I had certainly not bargained for a military campaign when I began transmission. I had not seen myself as a warlord but I effectively evolved into one.’

From his significant pause, I realized he had made a joke and laughed dutifully.

‘At once I hired mercenaries and, of necessity, an element of attrition entered the deployment of my imagery since, initially, I could to some extent control the evolution of the phantoms by the use of the sets of samples and my blind old professor, who once received a little training in divination from my wife, could also suggest certain possible mutations of events which usually, in fact, transpired. However, I had always intended to phase myself out of operations when I had clear evidence of the autonomous, free-form, self-promulgation of concretized desires. But, once the set of samples was accidentally destroyed, my calculations went awry. Nebulous time arrived instantaneously rather than in the course of a programmed dissolution of time itself and I did not know if the manifestations could, as it were, stand on their own two feet. Or on whatever number of feet they decided to possess.

‘But every day the aerial patrols spot more and more growths of hitherto unimaginable flora and herds of biologically dubious fauna inhabiting hitherto unformulated territory. And, of course, Albertina’s detailed reports of the tribe of a quite illusory African coast and the verifiable, photographable activities of beasts with no reality status whatsoever indicate the manifestations are functioning perfectly adequately. Indeed, all have reified themselves to such an extent that they seem to believe themselves quite firmly rooted in the imaginary sub-stratum of time itself.’

Lecturing seemed to tire him. He took another drink of water and dissolved two tablets into it before he swallowed it. Yet he was the man who wanted to establish a dictatorship of desire.

‘But the Cannibal Chief was real enough!’ I objected.

‘The Cannibal Chief was the triumphant creation of nebulous time. He was brought into being only because of the Count’s desire for self-destruction.’ He hid a yawn with a desiccated hand.

‘But I know he was real enough because I killed him!’

‘What kind of proof is that?’ asked Hoffman with a chill smile and all at once I felt a twinge of doubt for killing the Chief was the only heroic action I performed in all my life and I knew at the time it was out of character.

‘The existence of things is like a galloping horse,’ he went on with that patronizing, Decembral smile of his. ‘There is no movement through which they become modified, no time when they are not changed. What I have achieved has been accomplished only through certain loopholes in metaphysics and I was able, as it were, to base a meta-technology upon metaphysics only by the most scrupulous observance of and adherence to the laws of empirical research. And I have hardly begun, yet. Compared with what is to come, my work so far has only been a period of inactivity, such as the Ancient Chinese called: “the beginning of an anteriority to the beginning”.’

I knew only that he had examined the world by the light of the intellect alone and had seen a totally different construction from that which the senses see by the light of reason. And yet he moved with the feeble effort of a man near death.

‘I think you have seen enough here,’ he said. ‘We will move on to the desire generators.’

We left the ballet of incipient forms and the throbbing drums and once again walked those white, endless corridors that were the unprepossessing viscera of dream. I was almost in possession of the secret now, and it did not seem to me to be worth much. Was I condemned to perpetual disillusionment? Were all the potential masters the world held for me to be revealed as nothing but monsters or charlatans or wraiths? Indeed, I knew from my own experience that, once liberated, those desires it seemed to me he cheapened as he talked of them were far greater than their liberator and could shine more brightly than a thousand suns and yet I did not think he knew what desire was. At the end of the corridor was a pair of sliding doors with Chinese characters painted on them.

‘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 from 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.