The combinations, p.21
The Combinations, page 21
deranged spermatozoa.
The fourth wall was framed by a pair of dark velvet drapes. Between them,
a French window opened onto a shallow balcony with a view across the Zítkov
Gardens & a stretch of river to where ranks of grizzled apartment buildings
stood along the western embankment. In front of the window was a heavy
settee, which Němec was sitting on. His crutches & left leg lay along the length
of it, requiring him to twist slightly to the right in order to observe his
interviewer.
Volta’s face was like a blank reflection. It was the face of somebody
waiting for something, only Němec couldn’t tell what. He thought of similar
scenes in films, where the psychiatrist instructs the patient in a weary voice to
tell him whatever the patient has on his mind. Volta at least had the appearance
of a man to whom weariness might be said to come naturally. They both waited
there in silence. Or almost silence. An audible ticking noise came from an
indeterminate source in the room, as if the room itself & everything in it were
somehow concerned with the keeping of Time. Along with the smoke from
Volta’s cigar, the sound had a vaguely hypnotic effect.
All of a sudden the image of the doctor hunched there on the other side
of the room reminded Němec of the Pigeon Man who sat in the park at
lunchtime under the clock, with a bag of breadcrumbs. Every pigeon in the
neighbourhood came flapping around, perched on his shoulders, head, hands,
summoned from the trees & sidewalks & gutters like some Pied Piper’s minions.
All the Pigeon Man ever seemed to do was sit on his bench covered with
pigeons, as if that was his sole purpose in life, directing whatever course of
meaningless activity allowed him to return to that same spot the next day & the
day after that.
Eventually, almost without being conscious of it, the words crept into
Němec’s mouth & he began telling Volta about the Pigeon Man. Volta didn’t say
anything, just puffed vaguely on his cigar in a cross-eyed kind of way. The ticking
continued. Němec could hear his own pulse & became conscious of the effort to
breathe. It reminded him of waiting in the corridor outside the Rehab Unit: the
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green anxiety of the walls, the buzzing of the overhead lights, a kind of permanent
fog creeping along the corridor. Each morning, when they wheeled him over from
Convalescents, he’d pass a crotchety janitor cleaning the floors. This janitor
belonged to the same secret tribe as the Pigeon Man. Without fail, every time they
wheeled Němec out of the elevator on the second floor, the janitor would be
ensconced on the landing, mutely prodding a mop & pail along the wall.
This janitor kept a small transistor radio in his pocket that crackled — an
abortive type of noise, audible from the waiting area outside the Blue Door.
Over time you’d expect the noise to drift closer or further away, but as long as
Němec waited it stayed the same. He’d mentioned these occurrences to the
nurse but she only gave him one of her looks.
Eventually, Němec reasoned, the janitor, with mop & pail & broken
radio, would have to work his way either up or down the next flight of stairs: if
up, to the Roentgen Lab & the Deep Image Room — if down, to Obstetrics,
Haematology & Gastroenterology. At some point he’d finish & begin again, like
some menial Sisyphus. Němec figured that all you’d need, to find out, was time.
With each visit to the Rehab Unit, an idea began to evolve in his mind. Under
various pretexts he advanced or delayed his arrival by five, or fifteen, or ten-
minute increments, till driven by an unbearable sense of panic he found himself
anticipating these appointments by as much as an hour, sometimes even two.
It made no difference, the janitor was always there ahead of him at the
same spot. For all Němec knew, the janitor might’ve been a kind of fixture, like
one of those cardboard cutouts they prop inside the doorways of banks, that
offer to shake your hand & empty your wallet for a small percentage. Mondays,
Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays Němec’d park at the far end of the landing &
eyeball him, with his mop & pail & busted radio & the spittle dangling just
beneath his lower lip, to see if he’d slip-up, give-in, tip his hand.
Armed with TV magazines, travel magazines, fashion magazines, men’s
health magazines, car enthusiast magazines, house&garden magazines, even the
weekend newspaper supplements, Němec took up his sentry position in the hope
of plotting the janitor’s course over the period of a day, then days. He considered
a week, but the routine of the hospital always prevented it. He would’ve been
prepared to stay there for a month (his prospects appeared open-ended) in order
to verify an hypothesis about a secret rationale he suspected must be at work.
What, after all, could account for the janitor’s senseless itinerary, one so
invariably concurrent with his own?
The first thing they teach you in hospital is patience, hehe. After a while,
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anything gets to be routine, even when it means doing nothing. Like a Zen cop
on permanent stake-out. It reminded Němec of the Prof & his chessboard, only
they didn’t let you play chess in the Ward, ’cause that might start people
thinking too much. He loathed sitting around in the TV room with the other
sufferers having their minds slowly sucked out of them by the box on the wall.
Tune in same time next time…
And it was all connected: all part of some hyper-regularised programme,
designed to make an individual’s will seem like a witless & paranoiac
hallucination. You could even learn to like it. The only way to stay sane was to
keep the numbness at bay & not allow yourself to be pummelled into submission
by fiendish janitors or nurses with thicknecked stormtrooper orderlies,
malevolent agents, all, of institutionalised retribution. Nothing whatsoever
seemed beyond the pale — like a sadistic vaudeville act tripped on lithium, to
entertain an unseen audience, concealed behind mirrored glass perhaps.
And what if all the doctors nurses orderlies were really androids under
their starched fronts? What if the hospital was a secret receiving station for
whole android colonies after the Revolution & the nerve centre, now, of some
invidious Plan to re-subjugate humanity, by anaesthesia, lobotomy, laxative,
hypochondria & sterilisation? Corridors & stairwells & enginerooms all haunted
by the ghosts of poor suffering idiots whose minds & bodies had systematically
been abducted. The janitor pushing his mop in a closed circle, the pigeons on
windowsills with rat-like surveillance eyes, the bandaged men they rotated in
front of the TV, the lift-operator with the same half-dozen buttons to press, the
vegetables in the refectory ladling out gruel onto trays in a production-line & the
sufferers with blunted spoons gagging on it. Purgatory never looked so inviting.
What if, Němec speculated, he too was becoming one of them? Some kind of zombified automaton caught in a pantomime conspiracy, the left side of the
brain playing along so as not to let slip to the right that it knows what’s really
going on? What were they up to in that operating theatre, wiring his pineal gland
to a hidden control switch, routed to the Cosmo-Synchronicity Machine over at
Head Office. A cenacle of faceless physicians bent on mesmerising him & the
world with brainwash hocuspocus? Who could say if their secret commands
weren’t already being issued & this wasn’t just Phase One of the warm-up? ( You
could be onto something there, kiddo.)
All this Němec relayed to Volta, though not in so many words, listening
to his own voice as though at a distance: a catalogue of delusions, fantasies,
objects of a trite-beyond-belief wishfulfilment. Almost instantly he began to
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perceive his obsessions in a new light, to see them for what they were, comical &
absurd. Volta had hardly moved. He was still staring at the end of his cigar —
he’d been staring at it pretty much the whole time, watching the ash sifting from
it like constipated pigeon crap. Němec wondered if the doctor had been listening
to a single word he’d said, or if that was the point. The ticking at least had
stopped, but it no longer seemed to matter.
l
A month passed before Němec told Volta about the Prof. He hadn’t thought of
the Old Man in a long time. They were rehearsing the usual routine in Volta’s
office, rewinding the clock & slowly getting to the point, Němec supposed, of
what he was doing there in the first place. He’d never seen Volta look
disconcerted, or anything other than bored, but he looked that way now.
‘How about,’ Volta grimaced, ‘if you could paint it for me in bold strokes,
cut to the chase, the bare essentials, a synopsis in other words…’
Němec gave it to him in shorthand from the top, about how they’d met,
the house at Jánský Vršek, the Voynich Manuscript, the Prof’s death & his
muses’ suicides. His own little misadventure didn’t seem to matter anymore.
‘What’d you say this, er, manuscript was called?’ Volta coughed.
Němec told him again & Volta wrote something on a sheet of paper.
‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘You find yourself attracted to conspiracies, don’t you?’
‘It seems it’s the conspiracies that’re attracted to me.’
‘And do you feel I’m part of some conspiracy against you?’
Němec shrugged —
‘What’s a conspiracy anyway?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ the doctor nodded pensively.
Němec wondered what exactly about his account of the Prof had brought
on the change in Volta. At first he figured it was the book — one of those man-
of-science types who get their goat up about the secret unsolved mysteries of the
world. Volta gave the impression of a man who took his own intellect for
granted, but a single doubt might’ve been all it took to cause the impression to
crumble. Or maybe it was just the last thing on Earth he’d expected out of
Němec’s mouth. The doctor seemed to cast a reassessing gaze over him. Then
after a while he said —
‘A philosopher, supposedly considered great, once wrote something along
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the lines of, There’s no document of civilisation which isn’t at the same time a
document of barbarism…’
Volta let his eyelids slide down slightly over his eyes, as if the effort to
speak aloud was suddenly making him tired all over again.
‘The same philosopher also wrote, And just as such a document isn’t free of
barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it’s been transmitted from one
owner to another… I wonder,’ Volta pursed his lips for a moment, ‘what you
might think of that.’
Němec looked back at him, thinking nothing. They shared a long silence,
at the end of which, with no further ceremony, Volta signalled the end of the
session & Němec, relieved to be let free, took up his crutches from the settee &
left. On the next occasion he entered the doctor’s office, Volta was slumped
unhappily in the same place with a dead cigar in the ashtray as if he hadn’t
moved in a week, a layer of dust on the shoulders of his jacket specked with hair-
oil & dandruff. He watched Němec cross the carpet from behind five feet of
mahogany, turning over a dead lightbulb in his hands, like one of Faust’s
creditors trying to decide if it could be turned into a buck or the whole thing was
a dead loss. The weight of something seemed to be slowly crushing him.
Now it’s all going to come out, Němec thought. They give you the stonewall
treatment just to get you off-balance then spill out over the sides as if they’re doing you
a big favour giving you a sob story to listen to for a change. Make you think you’re
getting something for nothing, the human touch, all that crap.
While Němec was arranging himself on the settee, a secretary shuffled
papers in the outer room then came across to Volta’s desk carrying a blue
cardboard folder with an inch-thick wad of paper bound in red tape. All this,
Němec figured, was just theatrics. Across the top of the folder there’d be his
name printed in neat little block capitals & inside there’d be a half-page of vital
statistics with the rest padded-out with blank paper to make it look like they had
him pinned, right down to the hour, minute, second of every puerile notion
that’d ever wafted through his left ear & out his right. He wondered why the
hell they bothered.
The secretary dumped the folder beside the ashtray & stared at it for a
moment as if that was going to accomplish anything. There was a dead fly
squashed against the top edge of the cardboard. The secretary, a young,
androgynous-looking male with short dark hair, wrinkled his lip, then gingerly
picked the dead fly up by its wings & dropped it into a wastepaper basket beside
the desk. Volta didn’t seem to notice any of this at all. Finally the secretary asked
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if there was anything else the doctor needed. It was a slightly affected voice that
seemed intended to give the impression of a piece of carp being filleted. Volta
didn’t respond so the secretary went out looking a little annoyed, but not enough
to put cracks in his face.
As soon as they were alone, the good doctor stopped fidgeting with the
lightbulb &, gazing deeply into it, let out a sigh. His lips moved in a thin
exaltation of despair —
‘You find me,’ he said, exposing the soft wrinkled palms of his hand while
balancing the lightbulb between the tips of thumb & index finger, like a card
player giving up a trick, ‘in difficult circumstances.’
Volta leant forward with his elbows on the desk & lowered his voice —
‘Forces are at work,’ it was barely a whisper, ‘ hostile forces, whose one
objective is to return medicine to the Dark Ages.’
It was beginning to sound all so familiar. Next would come the focusing
of Reason’s light & all that. Němec said nothing, making an expression with his
face evocative of someone not at all too bright. The doctor sighed again & set
the lightbulb down carefully on the desk in front of him. This accomplished, he
began rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. A long silence ensued. As he
rubbed his eyes, the lightbulb slowly rolled to the edge of his desk & fell
noiselessly onto the carpet. Perhaps a minute passed before Volta took his hands
away from his face, clasping them in front of him. He regarded Němec with eyes
gone red around the edges, the picture of a man wrestling with a monumental
fatigue. He’d’ve gone over big at the panto.
Němec wondered where this new approach was leading. He glanced down
at the lightbulb then quickly around the room to see if there was a fixture it
might’ve belonged to. Perhaps it was some sort of test, one of those innocuous
everyday objects whose unexpected appearance was designed to provoke a
“psychological” response. It was a larger-than-ordinary lightbulb, about
watts, more what you’d expect in an interrogation room than a piece of office
furniture. A coil of broken filament dangled inside it, clearly visible. Maybe that
was meant to symbolise something?
‘Let me explain,’ Volta moaned.
There didn’t seem to be any choice, so Němec sat there & waited to hear
what the man had to say.
‘History,’ he began, ‘destiny, the world & our place in it, these are merely…’
he waived his right hand feebly, ‘ phantasmagorias. But what if that’s all there is?’
The doctor sat there, still tipped forward slightly, eyes vacant, focused on
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some abstract & infinitely remote point. His voice was very low — a voice that
seemed to do without him, to be its own master. It was the sort of voice you
could easily relinquish yourself to, lulled into a sense of general benefaction, like
some credulous idiot, & no longer having to think at all. He & the Prof, Němec
decided, probably wouldn’t’ve liked each other very much — no conversation
would ever’ve been big enough for the both of them.
‘We exist,’ the doctor’s voice went on, ‘at a nexus of competing desires,
which we mistake for our own. But no man owns his desire, desire owns him —
a truth which for centuries men have tried to conceal.’
Němec had to strain to hear what Volta was saying. The doctor’s words
crept over him like a subliminal music moving within itself — what they meant
seemed less important than the manner in which they were spoken. Well it was
a fine thing, Němec supposed, to have the sound of your own voice to smooth-
