The Architect (7 page)

There were blonde-headed Swedes and dark-skinned Africans. Japanese stood beside Greeks and clean-shaven Russians laboured next to South Americans with silky black beards. A Ukrainian woman with a handkerchief tied around her head shovelled sand. An inadequately dressed young lady from California carried water. The people came, from north and south, from the mountains and the coast, uttering words in half the languages of the earth. The whole recalled some scene from the Old Testament—a vast undertaking such as might have been done by pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty.

And it must be here said that the congregation were from all walks of life, from all strata of society. The rich, the educated, shoved themselves forward with as much vehemence as the illiterate, showing indeed that wisdom cannot be taught in schools and that the laws of social facilitation apply to all.

Businessmen unknotted their ties, slipped into overalls and let their soft hands, used to nothing heavier than banknotes, nothing harsher than the keys of a computer keyboard, make contact with abrasive work, while the lower classes lurched forward, calves taut, pulling at thick ropes, like donkeys or oxen. Lines of men, like tribes of ants, made their way about the structure, their backs bent under huge loads, the palms of their hands raw wounds from pushing against blocks of stone.

By the beginning of March they had ten thousand men assembled. By the middle of the same month, the number had more than doubled and by April there were no less than eighty thousand—enough to fill a small city.

The work force was divided into four gangs, named, respectively: the Friends of Körn, the Sons of Zeus, the Brothers of Julian the Apostate, and the Sisters of Future Well-being, the latter of which was put under the supervision of Maria. Each gang was then divided into five phyla of around five thousand workers respectively. With this huge, though admittedly rather unskilled work force, the building grew visibly day by day and seemed to be slowly revealing itself as if by magic—trembling in the light and sighing in the darkness; eating the rays of the sun and drinking in the moonshine. The walls wrapped themselves around the foundation and great pillars began to make their appearance, columns which stretched themselves out like fingers, seeming thereby to replicate the digits of the very hands that made them—those appendages of the ever-zealous Sons of Zeus, who indeed proved themselves to be the strongest, the most energetic of the phyla.

One of their number, an old Swedish man with a long white beard, went about his tasks with especial vigour. He had his feet eternally resting in a pair of hiking boots and liked to dress in polypropolene and polyurethane materials. He strained his thin arms, stuck forward his bird-like chest and worked in silence, rising well before dawn and not discontinuing his efforts until long after dark.

“Who is that fellow?” Nachtman enquired of Nesler.

“His name is Olaf Lidskog. He is an eccentric millionaire well dedicated to the cause.”

“So he has donated?”

“Heavily.”

There are few things in this world more frightening than voluntary slavery. The slave in shackles is without freedom, but has a will and hope, things which the voluntary slave has not. He has renounced the power to think for himself and without analytical thought, mankind would be nothing more than a hive of rather large insects—a horde of giant larvae feeding on every other living thing in their path. And yet there undoubtedly must be a certain kind of horrible peace in renouncing free-will, as the vast majority of human-kind is ready to do so, only needing to be asked by the right apostle.

Nachtman drove those disciples on with fiery words, kicks; hot exhalations of his stinking, liquor tainted breath, the pressure of his knuckle-studded fists. His voice, through almost constant yelling, grew hoarse and he seemed to be digging his words up from the depths of some horrible cave which respired sulphur and spat flames.

Dr. Enheim seemed determined to set an example and often arrived to lend his two hands to the great task. His labours were almost biblical in proportion. Stripped to the waist, sweat streaming down his face, he pushed along blocks of marble, with great burdens on his back climbed up the dizzying scaffolding like a baboon.

“If all of our workers were like him, the place would have been finished long ago,” Nachtman commented.

He himself would not even pick up a hammer.

“Physical labour will drain my mental abilities,” he said. “And God knows we need them.”

XVI.

Aside from the work forces previously mentioned, there was another, an elite group called the Company of Good Men—a group hand-picked by Nachtman from the largest and most durable of the male devotees. Rivers of tendons and mountains of muscle. There was a fellow from Iceland with scant blond hair and a forlorn gaze who could pull along a tractor with his teeth and a pair of brothers from Pakistan with huge biceps who were able to play catch with enormous boulders. Men of maximised muscle. Men with predatory jaws. Columbians who could bend iron bars with their hands and Ukrainians who could jog about with 150 kg barrels under each arm.

Nachtman took these specimens, these already Herculean young men, and injected them daily with extract of dog testicles and anabolic steroids and kept them fed on abundant quantities of beef, chickens and baby food.

These men, who could each do the work of fifty, were the pride of the work site and seemed to vie with one another for performing incredible tasks. They dragged huge carts of gravel, were able to pound in nails with their bare palms, break up rock with their fists, and scale slick walls without the need of scaffolding or ropes. Their huge arms flung about blocks of stone, pulled them to the heights with pulleys and they worked almost without rest.

The architect took special care to make them his own, having them swear by secret oaths and their duties certainly went beyond that of mere workers, as they stood by ready to champion his cause, and even give their lives if need be.

“Master,” Sergei from Russia said, “I am hungry.”

“Ah, you boys eat so much. But I need to keep you healthy. A truckload of sheep has just come in for you and Pedro to unload.”

And as the flowers of May shoved themselves up from the ground, those huge men shoved barely cooked and even raw flesh into their mouths, ravenously chewed on mutton.

XVII.

When Trudy visited the site, she was inevitably drawn to Peter. Their ages were similar. The one was the daughter of Dr. Herman Enheim, the other the nephew of Maria Venezuela. And they were both enthusiastic about this great undertaking. She always had a dozen questions regarding the project to ask him, and he was more than happy to have someone to listen to his voice.

And, gazing at her through his glasses, thrusting his long nose forward, he would wax eloquent, pouring forth his bizarre dreams of a future in which architecture was realised for what it was, the greatest of all arts, and nature was done away with, replaced entirely by buildings, cities—forests supplanted by well-planned gardens and oceans spanned by bridges.

She in turn, in a very quiet voice, casting shy gazes about, spoke enthusiastically about the Society, and about its great work, marching forward into a new spiritual age. She seemed to view things according to their transcendental qualities and her speech was always modified according to esoteric principles.

“Finally there will be a place where truth-seekers from all over the world can meet and learn in peace. This is true evolution. We will all be able to work together on a trans-dimensional level.”

“You seem to know a great deal about the Philosophy,” Peter commented.

She blushed.

“Yes, I try to put the etheric currents in my body to good use.”

The young man, murmuring his approval, cast his eyes over her plump arms.

“And Herr Nachtman is fortunate to have you as his assistant, Peter.”

“I am the one who is fortunate.”

XVIII.

The power Nachtman had been given increased his personal sense of virility, to the joy of Maria, who worshipped, had indeed fallen deeply in love with him. She saw sunsets, white banks of clouds and green forests in his grotesque face. For her, the bark of his voice was as sweet as the song of birds and she wished to clothe him in pleasures. Tenderly she caressed the rough rind of his skin, joyfully offering him her most intimate treasures—her beryls and amber, her amethyst and topaz—performing nude snake dances before him, while to her right and left censors spilled out the smoke of spikenard and dried roses.

The psychology of love is infinitely complex;—female beetles are attracted to the ugliest males;—woman, primordial, is often suicidally drawn to the sharp horns and lances of the male and casts herself onto his personality like one hurling themselves from a cliff. A swirling sky; some cold and clumsy planet attracting a silvery moon. Black holes that gorge themselves on female energies and spit out nothing in return—the primitive writhing of the worm as it digs into some geological crack.

So Nachtman took her love as a matter of course.

She would arrive in his tent and, after rinsing his gums with schnapps, he would enwrap her in his arms and take her rapidly to the temple of debauchery, treating her to vulgarity sauced with plumeria and topinambur and he indeed seemed like the descendent of some ancient god or demi-god, some boar-headed divinity cast on earth in order to perform great deeds, to slaughter men and stack their corpses as high as the heavens, or a creature hatched from an egg, a man-lizard well versed in the obscene arts, which had fed itself for years on Indian and Mongolian love manuals and pickled itself in a cosmic vinegar of procreation. For, whatever one may think, it is often those old reptiles who know best which buttons to push, know how to poke amongst the springs and levers of love.

“You have given me life,” she murmured.

“Lucky girl.”

She lay her head on his chest.

“When I first saw you, I never imagined that this would happen.”

“They never do.”

And a long kiss, filthy and dark as a sewer, followed his words.

XIX.

The building site became imbued with an almost apostolic aura. In the evening, members of the work force would often perform some of the complex rituals prescribed by Dr. Körn—group meditations, initiations, cleanses and rites. Mystical texts were read aloud and songs were sung to the rattle of cymbals and the sound of the flute while special initiates revealed magical finger symbols. Dr. Enheim would ceremoniously rip the entrails from just-slaughtered cows and Maria, in a sweet high-pitched voice, chanted out the song of Isis while sugarcane and beans were distributed to her listeners.

These people, from diverse backgrounds and stations in life, felt a great sense of fraternity sitting together on that mountaintop amidst the blocks of stone and heavy machinery and, gazing into great bonfires, clasping each-other’s hands, they felt indeed to be the chosen few. They were carried away by a sort of mass hysteria. Their one and joint desire was to see this grand structure transport them up to the skies and imbue their poor emaciated frames with immortality. It was a mass monomania, where the community, the Society, swallowed up all individual will, and, converted into a single superorganism, moved in concert. Their energies were channelled toward a single goal, which was to bring Nachtman’s plan to completion and thereafter go to an eccentric universe where they would be born as sexless creatures of light with wings who would receive their nutriment directly from the atmosphere—a variety of moth much loved by the Great Creator who reclined placidly off in some vast and almost unreachable dimension, somewhat bored, while down below the fangs of men, upright wolves, dripped with blood and their claws greedily ripped the life from the very earth itself.

And so it is that the more desperate men become, the more wild are their dreams. Shunning the world around them, ignoring the blue skies and singing streams, they look for beauty in some great beyond, their diseased minds crippled by stupidity, their senses perverted by occult mechanisms.

Those workers, those devotees, suffered truly great hardships. They laboured fourteen hour days, seven days a week. Their diet consisted for the most part of thin soups and white bread. While working, the members were told to repeat mantra-like clichés to keep up their stamina and so there was a constant murmuring, like around a huge bee-hive.

The entire mountainside was crowded with tents. The number of people was more than it was possible to properly facilitate. They slept crowded one next to the other. Latrines were formed between the rocks and the people bathed in the unhealthy trickles of water which issued from between outcrops of mossy granite. Due to the unsanitary living conditions, many became ill, were seen vomiting in shrubs.

Dr. Enheim rallied the disciples, shook their hands, gave frequent speeches—giving them spiritual food in place of physical, talking about the comforts of other planes, where in some future time they would dine on the most exotic fruits and drink wine from the blossoms of flowers. They would write with solar beams rather than ink and harvest the energy of far away planets.

One evening, amongst the tents, before a great fire whose flames lurched towards the stars, a crowd of thousands gathered around him:

“In a time in which many are experiencing a crisis of spirit and search for meaning, we offer a chance to work and celebrate through service and community-building in which all participants flourish. We must gather together and oppose all selfishness!”

As he spoke, his voice grew more resonant, its rich tones flowing out over the multitude. He seemed a new Moses, who, with shittim wood in hand, pointed the way even beyond Horeb.

“With your hands, my friends, you are building a temple of universal brotherhood, where truth can be learned and spiritual endeavours nurtured. Let us sail together to this place, this future where the zodiacal constellations and five planets converge, and the Mysteries will be unveiled to all, in a context of light and friendship!”