The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (39 page)

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 then 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.

And there were no more transformations because Albertina’s eyes were extinguished.

On I went, through the lifeless vegetation of winter, and I thought myself free from all the clouds of attachment because I was a traveller who had denied his proper destination. I saw no colours anywhere around me. The food I begged from cottagers had no savour of either sweetness or rankness. I knew I was condemned to disillusionment in perpetuity. My punishment had been my crime.

I returned slowly to the capital. I had neither reason nor desire to do so. Only my inertia, dormant for so long, now reasserted itself and carried me there by its own passive, miserable, apathetic force. In this city I am, or have been, as you know, a hero. I became one of the founders of the new constitution – largely from the negative propulsion of my own inertia for, once I was placed and honoured on my plinth, I was not the man to climb down again, saying: ‘But I am the wrong man!’ for I felt that, if what I had done had turned out for the common good, I might as well reap what benefits I could from it. The shrug is my gesture. The sneer is my expression. If she was air and fire, I was earth and water, that residue of motionless, inert matter that cannot, by its very nature, become irradiated and may not aspire, even if it tries. I am the check, the impulse of restraint. So I effectively evolved into a politician, did I not? I, an old hero, a crumbling statue in an abandoned square.

I returned slowly through the mists of winter. Time lay more thickly about me than the mists. I was so unused to moving through time that I felt like a man walking under water. Time exerted great pressure on my blood vessels and my eardrums, so that I suffered from terrible headaches, weakness and nausea. Time clogged the hooves of my mare until she lay down beneath me and died. Nebulous Time was now time past; I crawled like a worm on its belly through the clinging mud of common time and the bare trees showed only the dreary shapes of an eternal November of the heart, for now all changes would henceforth be, as they had been before, absolutely predictable. And so I identified at last the flavour of my daily bread; it was and would be that of regret. Not, you understand, of remorse; only of regret, that insatiable regret with which we acknowledge that the impossible is,
per se
, impossible.

Well, I walked the heels out of my silk socks and the soles off my patent leather pumps and I fell down to sleep and rose to walk again until this filthy scarecrow in ragged evening dress, his matted hair falling over his shoulders and his gaunt jaw sprouting unkempt beard, his lapel still stuck through with a blackened rose of stiffened blood – until I saw before me, one moonlit dawn, the smoking ruins of a familiar city.

But as I drew nearer, I saw the ruins were inhabited.

Old Desiderio lays down his pen. In a little while, they will bring me my hot drink before they put me to bed and I am glad of these small attentions for they are the comforts of the old, although they are quite meaningless.

My head aches with writing. What a thick book my memoirs make! What a fat book to coffin young Desiderio, who was so thin and supple. My head aches. I close my eyes.

Unbidden, she comes.

*
A pastel-coloured joke, designed to produce a discreet titter among freshmen. Desiderio.

*
Sigmund Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams
. Desiderio.