ODD? (6 page)

The concierge closed the door quietly and walked softly down the corridor to 205. He was doing his best not to feel jumpy, but he had to admit that the whole thing was odd. Once inside, he too noticed that although the painter’s equipment was there, they had yet to begin work. Nevertheless, it looked to him as if someone else, probably Slokker, had been there before him. Things had been moved around. When he checked the windowless room he had to leave the door open so that he could see more clearly into the unlit chamber. There was an odd shadow in the gloom, and so he switched on the dim lamp.

The light revealed Slokker’s starved body hanging in mid-air. The face was fixed in a grimace of pain and the lips were drawn back from clenched teeth. The sightless eyes were staring downwards at his reflection in the mirror. Slokker must have taken the belt from his trousers, fastened it around his neck, climbed up onto the chair and then attached the buckle to the obsolete light fitting on the ceiling. He had then kicked away the chair.

The concierge made himself turn away from the sight and his first thought was of the nasty reputation another suicide might lend the building. First Monsieur Deschamps (though he had at least had the decency to end his life elsewhere) and now this young idiot! He closed the door behind him, ensured that it was securely locked once more and made his way back to his office downstairs. As he sat waiting for the gendarmes’ arrival, he realised that he must have picked up some of the pamphlets from Slokker’s rooms. They were there in front of him, on the desk. He must have put them down there before he’d telephoned the authorities.

That night, after they had taken Slokker’s body away, the concierge was troubled by a dream about being trapped in a dark, windowless room.

MODERN CITIES EXIST ONLY TO BE DESTROYED

Michael Cisco

Michael Cisco is best known for his first novel,
The Divinity Student,
which won the International Horror Guild Award in 1999. Since then, Cisco has published
The San Veneficio Canon
,
The Traitor
,
The Tyrant, The Narrator
, and
The Great Lover.
The story included herein previously appeared only in a limited edition published in Bucharest.

Standing at the edge of the platform, X. gazes at a panel set in the dingy, bruise-colored wall on the opposite side of the tracks. The wall folds inwards a few feet to the left of the panel, forming a corner that has been invaded by an irregular patch of lacy white scale, which, at times, he thinks looks like the spray of a violent sea, frozen in mid-leap as it dashes against the rocks of the shore. At other times, he sees profiles in it: a grimacing hag with a surprised-looking eye nestled in her hair, or a supine child’s face gazing up in death or wonder as another, half-formed spirit face emerges from its nostrils.

The panel is perhaps a little more than three feet square, and set in the wall at floor level. Large bolt heads stud the outline at intervals, and both they, and the panel, which might be slightly concave, are the same grimy color as the wall. What’s behind it? The question barely glances through his mind. He looks at it as if he were imagining first one possibility and then another, but no such thing. He is only looking at it because it holds his attention magnetically. What might lie behind it is of no more importance than what or who might happen, for example, to be behind him, just at that moment.

The panel is more like a mirror, reflecting something about himself. It could be the door of a tomb, rudely chiseled into the wall of a cave and sealed with excessive measures, as if being dead weren’t enough, one also had to be imprisoned. At the same time, the panel is obviously the work of some impersonal city agency, one job among many done by one functionary among many, so that the work and its purpose, the one who directs the act and the one who carries it out, are not united in one place and time. The panel is at least as real as he is. But it may be that its reality is bestowed on it by his attention.

X. glances at the people standing to either side of him on the crowded platform. They are all facing the wall, and all of them are reading. The distant train, which hoots once down the tunnel as it comes, presses dank, cemetery air before it, stirring the white leaves of the books. It’s the end of the working day, and they are all presumably going home. His physical stamina, thanks to the Gurdjieff Exercises, is excellent, and his body is neither especially lively nor particularly tired. His mind, however, feels like a piece of fabric that has been stretched out of shape, and his thoughts are lifeless and subdued. The day of work just completed was long and filled with effort, but, even though he is all too sensible of the fatigue it left behind in him, it nevertheless seems in hindsight as though it had flashed by in an instant.

A booming voice comes over the public address system, at once loud and unintelligible. The announcement goes on and on, with every now and then a word poking up into near comprehensibility through the wash of sound like a figure under a blanket, until it becomes a kind of oppressive smoke hanging under the ceiling. The less attentively he listens, the more plainly he can make out what is being said:

“The purpose of these announcements is not to impart information, but to prevent aesthetic impressions from taking form by impairing your ability to concentrate and by forcing you to seal yourself off from outward sensation, so as to make you unreceptive to mood, thereby relentlessly dragging you back to the idiotic, abbreviated world that must continue to confine you . . .”

People continue to pour onto the platform from the enormous stairway that opens, like a chute, at one end. As they continue to stream past him, one after another, steadily streaming past him, piling into that station, endlessly piling in and piling in, a feeling of horror begins to stir in him. It doesn’t matter if the train comes. However many may board it here, they will be instantly replaced, and then some. What grips him is nothing other than the streaming of these people, that there is no end to it.

The train glides into the station. The doors part like buttocks. He enters with relief, and goes to the spot prepared for him. Once again, briefly, he fixes his gaze on the panel in the wall, which is still visible through the window. While he stood on the platform, he looked at it passively, but, this time, he seeks it out and takes hold of it with his mind, perhaps with the confused idea that he might be able to collect from it some of the sense of his own reality with which he had imbued it. The train croons and the panel slides away into a purple shadow.

He observes the other passengers as they appear reflected in the black windows. Looking at them, it would be easy to get the impression that groping vacuously in bags and purses was the sole purpose for their existence. Many of them are slumped in sleep, while others, holding up their books or newspapers, dart suspicious glances this way and that; they are really reading the train and the passengers.

After another stop, he takes an open seat and tries, without much success, to fit his flaccid, overstretched gaze into the confines of the neat white book in his hands. He is, by preference, only vaguely aware of those around him. There is a man with a shockingly large, rubbery face sitting not far from him on one side, and, on the other, a figure drooping in sleep, and somehow obscured. Glancing in that direction, it’s almost as if a blind spot appears in X.’s field of vision, hiding the man. A modishly-dressed young woman with a wide, goblin face sits opposite him. When it occurs to him to make a brief note to himself about the panel, a way to return once again to that impression even as the panel and its wall are hurtling away from him into a darkness like the depths of the ocean, to linger over that impression and its higher relief of reality. As he takes out his notebook to jot down a few words, a disagreeable expression of self-satisfaction comes over the face of the woman across the aisle, as if she assumed he must be taking down a description of her, so that he could recapture her image later on.

There is the usual jabbering, too, but his senses are too blunted with fatigue to be susceptible to irritation. It isn’t the language, as there are many spoken here, but the flat, insistent manner of speaking that is grating. Glancing around, he takes in the other passengers in a quick, perfunctory survey. They wear the faces printed on money.

The noise of these voices and bag rummagers becomes muffled. The air in the train is getting bad. As the atmosphere closes in on him, X. feels groggy, shiftless, and unable to focus his eyes on the words on the page. He dabs at his chest several times with the butt end of his pen before he can manage to get it into his shirt pocket, and finally allows himself to sink backward in his seat . . .

A squeal of brakes startles him — the train is different. No, it is the same, but his seat is different. He now occupies the seat in which the strangely obscured sleeping man had been. His mouth is pasty and dry, his body stiff, complaining in every joint, and this, and his inability to recognize anyone on the train, contributes to the presentiment of alarm that gathers in the still-dim corners of his waking mind. Through the window, he can see the lights of the next station appear against the tunnel walls ahead. A longing for the open air and sky comes over him; he thinks of the walk he took a night or two ago, gazing up at Jupiter, calm and tremendous. The first winds of autumn were tossing in the trees, so unlike the lifeless stillness of summer. The autumn winds, lightly fragrant like a woman’s hair, always bring him a special awakening feeling, even though they were harbingers of death. October was the month of his birth, and it sometimes felt as if the autumn season recognized him as one of its own creations. Now, if he were to get up and make his way to the surface, he might see Jupiter again, as if no time at all had elapsed since he’d seen it last.

He glances warily at his watch, expecting it to be shockingly late. For a time, he labors to understand its face, how it could now be five minutes earlier than it was the last time he’d looked at the time. The perennial night of the tunnels has fooled him; it’s almost
twelve hours
later.

The next station appears on the far side of the car. Through the other window, the one closer to him, he watches in silent consternation as the panel slides toward him. The train has gone full circle. How many times? The people standing on the platform look weary, heads hanging down over their books. They board the train with clumsy, enervated movements, and one man goes to stand somewhat before him. This man is neither familiar nor unfamiliar; it’s difficult to say what he looks like, so changeable are his features from one moment to the next, but he is gazing out the window, and his eyes are riveted on the panel.

X. rubs his face, and puts his clothes in order, although they seem entirely crisp and fresh, better than expected. Another stop. A seat empties, and the man who looked at the panel sits in it. Is it the same seat X. sat in? It does seem to be roughly in the same part of the train, but whether or not it is the very same one is not for his memory to say. The man makes a note in a notebook and claps it shut efficiently. Then he raises his eyes to the young woman sitting opposite him. She is dressed with a great deal of deference to the magazines, but for all her obvious vanity she has the face of a villainous fairy.

“I wasn’t writing about you,” the man says to her with a smile. His manner is abrupt, and she stiffens and lowers her eyes without responding. At the next stop, she leaves the train.

The man has noticed X.; despite himself, he has been watching him too closely to pretend otherwise now. Without a word, he rises and sits beside X. His face is familiar; he is sprucely dressed, and X. notices he has an irregularly-shaped ring of dull metal on the ring finger of his left hand. Now that he is closer, if anything he is more difficult to see clearly than before; when there was some distance between them, X. could see him entire, if indistinctly. Up close, X. can see only such details as his posture reveals, and his posture is always shifting slightly, even if he conveys more of an impression of stillness than of restlessness.

“Are you awake?” he asks, only barely turning his head toward X.

“Mostly,” X. replies, rubbing his forehead and the bridge of his nose. “I must have slept so long.”

“Falling asleep is dangerous,” the man says. “What you have may be taken from you.”

X. checks his pockets. “Nothing missing, I think.”

A faint smile crosses the man’s lips, or so it seems to X., who can only see some of his face at a time. “That’s more attributable to sloth or cowardice than goodwill,” he says. “Although perhaps sloth and cowardice are not the best words to describe the city dweller’s lack of spirit.”

He speaks in a dry, brisk way, with an indulgent coolness that only makes the things he says seem that much more matter-of-fact.

“The modern city exists only to be destroyed,” he says flatly. “The frenetic activity you see around you every moment of the day and night is not creative, but purely destructive. Here, human beings are worked to death and leave nothing behind them but that which will ruin the generation to come. This city, like all others now, exists only insofar as it is collapsing, and all its activities are dimensions of its collapse. This work they do is their own destruction, sustaining itself.

“The modern city exists only to be destroyed.”

With a small whisk of his hand, he gestures to the people seated around them, and goes on, keeping his voice low. Quietly as he speaks, X. still has no difficulty hearing every word distinctly through the roar of the train.

“These people all dream of its final, catastrophic destruction, only pretending to dread it, perhaps trying to convince themselves that it is dread, and not yearning, that the vision of a final catastrophe elicits in them. This is not real defiance. It is not the vision of the end of the city that matters, but the vision of what is to come after. That is everything, and these people do not look that far. Have you?”

X. turns his head, not toward the man, but toward the window, at the black underground world out there, which could be hurtling by at fantastic speed, or sitting motionless, surrounding a train that rocks and bellows in place like a bull caught in a pen.

Now X. looks into the face of the man beside him.

“I see,” the man says quietly. “Take me there.”

The village seems freshly abandoned, in good repair, though dark. Walking down its modest main street and glancing about himself, X. sees nothing but its buildings. The land beyond is hidden, and even the sky above is only a shadow, without a single star, or even a cloud, unless perhaps the entire sky is covered by one single uniform cloud, very high and utterly opaque. The darkness does have a cloudlike feltiness, and a murky quality that clear, windswept nights never have. All the same, the air in the streets is intoxicatingly fresh, cool and invigorating. The effect it has on his companion only goes to show that this impression is more than imagination. From a nearly somnolent trudging, the man’s step grows lighter and more dancer-like pace by pace. His carriage is more erect, and his eyes more bright. The village, what’s more, is answering his liveliness with lights and by some other, subtler effects X. can only just dimly take note of, but which do make it clear that activity of some kind, some happy bustling, is stirring in the houses.

Lights dart out their flashes across the reviving village. Shadows lean and pivot against the ground, but the beautiful darkness of the night is not dispelled by these lights, which have no glare. It seems instead as if the night has flung open its windows here and there among the outlines of the buildings. There are no figures to be seen, but the hum of activity, still not quite audible or at least so quiet that it doesn’t disturb the pleasing silence of the night, is growing. He looks at his companion, who has unlaced his arm from his and is looking around himself in a transport of happiness, rubbing his hands together, then opening his arms in an invitation to embrace him, directed not at X., but at the town.