The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (17 page)

The wind blew through my soaking clothes and the cold woke up the old Desiderio. As I turned my back on the barges and set my face towards the distant lights of the town, I welcomed myself to the old home of my former self with a bored distaste. Desiderio had saved Kiku from the dear parents who would have dined off him but Kiku still could not find it in his heart just yet to thank Desiderio for it, as all his hopes of ease and tranquillity ran off and away from him like the river water that dripped from his clothing at every step.

The clock in the market square told me it was a quarter to four in the morning and the market square was full of the booths and sideshows of the Christmas fair, all locked, shuttered and deserted at this hour. I thought I might find a little shelter against what remained of the night in one of the tents and so I went down the canvas alleys until I found an entrance held open by a rope, as if someone inside were waiting for me. I recognized the booth instantly. This time, the sign outside said: EVERYBODY’S SPECIAL XMAS PRESENT. I went inside. He rustled in his straw.

‘Candle and matches on the box,’ he said. ‘And close up the flap now you’re inside, boy. Brass monkey weather, dammit.’

As I expected, I saw in the machine, rotating as on a pole, a woman’s head flung back as if in ecstasy, so that the black hair unfurled like grandiloquent flags around her. The head of Dr Hoffman’s ambassador turned like the world on its axis and one severed hand pressed its forefinger against her lips as if to tell me she was keeping a delicious secret while the other was extended as if to joyfully greet my return to her.

It was titled: PRECARIOUS GLIMMERING, A HEAD SUSPENDED FROM INFINITY.

‘If you’ve seen all you want, you can save me the candle,’ he said and I blew it out so that the only light was the serrated luminous disc cast upwards on to the ceiling by a small oil stove. I knelt gratefully beside the stove for I was shivering while he, muttering, began to potter about making a meal for me. I was surprised and touched by these unhandy preparations. He opened a cardboard box, his larder, and took out half a loaf and a heel of rat-trap cheese on a tin plate; then he poured cold coffee from a bottle into a chipped enamel saucepan and set it on top of the stove to warm.

‘I had a change of orders,’ he explained. ‘Got to look after you. Got to see you get there safe and sound.
She
came herself and told me.’

‘She?’

‘The she of she’s. His daughter.’

‘Albertina?’

I had never spoken the name aloud before.

‘You’re smart,’ he applauded. ‘Oh, you know the nature of plus all right’.

‘I can,’ I said, ‘put two and two together.’

‘Where’ve you been since you did for poor Mary Anne?’ But he leered and grimaced as he spoke so I knew he knew I knew he knew I had not, in fact, murdered the unfortunate girl but that, for some reason, I was now forced to pretend that I had. However, I was too tired to continue with such Byzantine perplexities.

‘Hiding,’ I said briefly.

‘They thought you’d most likely try to find me sooner or later, if you were still alive, that is.’

He tested the temperature of the coffee with his thumb.

‘Seeing,’ he added with a certain smugness, ‘that I’m your only clue.’

So he gave me back my quest but I could not think about it yet. I ate his food and let him wrap a blanket round me for I had taken a violent chill and, no matter how closely I hugged the stove, my teeth would not stop chattering.

‘You mustn’t get sick, you know,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a goodish long trip before we get there.’

‘I’m to go with you, am I?’

‘Oh, yes. I’m to give you a job as my assistant and also identification: to wit, my nephew. You’ll drive my little new old truck for me and put up the tent for me and oil the machines for me and so on, for I am getting on in years and not so active as I was.’

‘How long will it take to reach there?’

‘Oh, there’ll be ample
time
,’ he said. ‘He’s coped wonderfully with time, hasn’t he. Worried about your city, are you?’

‘Not particularly,’ I confessed.

‘He could probably use a smart young man like you in his organization.’

He gave me a mug of hot coffee and I warmed my hands on it.

‘But I do have my own orders, you know.’

My tongue tripped on the standard speech and, as I had become aware of positive happiness among the river people for the first time in my life, now I knew at last the flavour of true misery for I would never speak their musical tongue again. The old man cocked his head inquisitively and I waited for him to ask me where I had been hiding but he was attending only to what I said, not the manner in which I said it.

‘Licensed to kill?’ he queried.

‘What is your precise relationship to Dr Hoffman?’ I parried.

He motioned me to pass him the mug and took some bitter sips before he replied. When he did so, his voice had lost something of its querulous senescence, so that I wondered to what extent he covered an authentic role in the Doctor’s play with that of an embittered old sot.

‘I am not necessarily connected with him,’ he said. ‘There are no such things as necessary connections. Necessary connections are fabulous beasts. Like the unicorn. Nevertheless, since things occasionally
do
come together in various mutable combinations, you might say that the Doctor and I have made a random intersection. He remembered me in my blindness. I was blind and old and had half drunk myself to death. He remembered me and he saved me. He even made me the curator of his museum.’

There was a note of quiet pride in his voice that did not suit the rotting old hut in which we sat and bed of straw on which he slept so I knew he was of more importance than he seemed and the Minister’s computers had known what they were about when they put me on his trail.

‘His museum?’ I asked tentatively.

‘The sack… behind you. Look.’

The sack was immensely heavy and contained innumerable small boxes each marked on the lid with an indented device so that the old man in his blindness could inform himself of their contents by a single touch. Each one of these boxes contained, as I expected, the models, slides and pictures which went inside the machines and were there magnified by lenses almost to life-size. A universality of figures of men, women, beasts, drawing rooms, auto-da-fés and scenes of every conceivable type was contained in these boxes, none of which was bigger than my thumb. I spilled out a mass of variegated objects on my lap, each a wonder of miniaturization and some of scarcely credible complexity.

‘The set of samples,’ he explained. He was beginning to address me as if I were a lecture theatre. As I watched them, they seemed to wriggle and writhe over my knees with the force of the life they simulated but I knew it was only a trick of the vague light from the oil stove.

‘I am proud to say he was my pupil,’ said the peep-show proprietor. ‘If I feel a little resentment against him from time to time, when my bones ache with the travelling – well, it is only to be expected. I wasn’t even his John the Baptist, you know. I queried his doctoral thesis. I mocked his friend, Mendoza. Yet he trusts me with his set of samples.’

He leaned over and plucked out a handful of figures.

‘Look at them. Do they look like toys?’

‘Yes. Like toys.’

‘They are symbolic constituents of representations of the basic constituents of the universe. If they are properly arranged, all the possible situations in the world and every possible mutation of those situations can be represented.’

‘Like the Minister’s computer bank?’

‘Not in the least,’ he snapped. ‘By the correct use of these samples, it would be possible to negate the reality of the Minister of Determination. Ironically enough, your Minister seeks the same final analysis my former pupil made long ago. But then the Doctor transcended it.’

He held out a bouquet of ferocious images of desire in my direction. They seemed almost to leap from his hand, such was their synthetic energy.

‘The symbols serve as patterns or templates from which physical objects and real events may be evolved by the process he calls “effective evolving”. I go about the world like Santa with a sack and nobody knows it is filled up with changes.’

I poured myself more coffee for I needed to keep my wits about me. After all, he had once been a rationalist even if now he were a charlatan.

‘I am very confused,’ I said. ‘Give me at least a hint of his methodology.’

‘First theory of Phenomenal Dynamics,’ he said. ‘The universe has no fixed substratum of fixed substances and its only reality lies in its phenomena.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I comprehend that.’

‘Second theory of Phenomenal Dynamics: only change is invariable.’

This sounded more like an aphorism than a hypothesis to me but I held my peace.

‘Third theory of Phenomenal Dynamics: the difference between a symbol and an object is quantitative, not qualitative.’

Then he sighed and fell silent. I saw through a rent in the canvas wall that though it was still night inside the booth, the dawn began in violet outside; and then I fell asleep.

Now I was in hiding from both the police – for my picture with a WANTED sign was posted outside the town police station – and also from the river people. I passed myself off as the peep-show proprietor’s renegade nephew. My new identity was perfect in every detail. I tailored my hair and moustache to new shapes and threw away my Indian clothes, putting on instead some dark, sober garments which came with my new identity. I guessed that in the Minister’s reckoning I was listed dead, among the casualties of the war, and that was why Dr Hoffman was taking such pains over me but all I had to do was to hide in the shadows of the booth, polish the lenses of the machines, watch my master arrange each day’s fresh, disquieting spectacles and listen to the various accounts of his former pupil’s activities that he gave me in the evenings as we sat beside the stove after our business was done for the day.

I was not competent, then, to comment on any of the information I received and I am not competent to do so now, even though I have seen the laboratories themselves, the generators and even the inscrutable doctor himself, at work among them with the awful conviction of a demiurge. But from the notes I made at the time, I extracted the following unlikely hints as to the intellectual principles underpinning the Doctor’s manifestations.

His main principles were indeed as follows: everything it is possible to imagine can also exist. A vast encylopedia of mythological references supported this initial hypothesis – shamans of Oceania who sang rude blocks of wood ship-shape without the intervention of an axe; poets of medieval Ireland whose withering odes scalded their kings’ enemies with plagues of boils; and so on and so forth. At a very early point in his studies Hoffman had moved well out of the realm of pure science and resurrected all manner of antique pseudo-sciences, alchemy, geomancy and the empirical investigation of those essences the ancient Chinese claimed created phenomena through an interplay of elemental aspects of maleness and femaleness. And then there was the notion of passion.

In the pocket of my dark suit I found a scrap of paper with the following quotation from de Sade written on it in the most exquisite, feminine handwriting; though the message was undirected and unsigned, I knew it was meant for me and that it came from Albertina.

‘My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass; they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.’

Yet I could see no personal significance in these words and finally decided they must refer to the machinery of the peep-show itself for I had even begun to believe that the manipulation of those numinous samples might indeed restructure events since, in a poetic and circuitous fashion, they had certainly helped to organize my disastrous night at the Mayor’s house.

But I was wistfully impressed by the grandiloquence of both de Sade and the girl who quoted him to me for I knew myself to be a man without much passion, even if I was a romantic. If I once again existed only in the vague hope I would one day see Albertina herself again, I could not imagine this desire might make me incandescent enough to glimpse her whereabouts by my own glow – let alone to utilize what my instructor in hyperphysics described to me as the ‘radiant energy’ which emanated from desire to blaze a path to her. A blind old man, playing with toys in a fairground, lost in a mazy web of memories of things he had not seen… it was a case of the blind leading the blind, for he could never have been a man who burned with passion himself, either! So when he spoke of Albertina as if she were lambent flame made flesh, his words rang curiously false, although I could remember my dream of the inextinguishable skeleton and wonder if she had visited him in a dream, too, for he could only see when he was asleep.

He had formed a loose attachment with the fairground people and so the old man, the carnival and I travelled on together. I found that the peep-show proprietor, anticipating my arrival, had rented a broken-down truck from the Armenian who operated the wheel of fortune. This was his new little old truck and I drove it for him as we moved with our new companions from place to place, part of a tumultuous cavalcade moving towards other towns along the winter roads. On the road I was as safe from the Indians as I had been from the police while I lived on the river. I was as safe from everything as I would have been in the Opera House, listening to
The Marriage of Figaro
, because the road was another kind of self-consistent river.