The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (37 page)

Hoffman said: ‘Once the samples are selected, interpreted, painted, cast and articulated, I can exhibit pain as positively as I can exhibit red. I show love in the same way that I show straight. I demonstrate fear just as precisely as I exemplify crooked. And ecstasy and tree and despair and stone, all exhibited in the same fashion. I can make you perceive ideas with your senses because I do not acknowledge any essential difference in the phenomenological bases of the two modes of thought. All things co-exist in pairs but mine is not an either/or world.

‘Mine is an and + and world.

‘I alone have discovered the key to the inexhaustible plus.’

His voice never rose above a drab monotone, never expressed enthusiasm, never invited astonishment. In him, the pedantry he had handed down to his daughter went unmodified by charm or leavened by intellectual passion.

‘What is the nature of that key, Doctor?’

‘Eroto-energy,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Here. I have something that will interest you.’

He took a tape recorder from the bowels of the cupboard and switched it on. After a preliminary crackle, I heard the voice of the Minister. After all that time, all those changes, I heard him speak again. The tape must have been monitored from a propaganda broadcast to the besieged city.

‘– and though real plagues have ravaged us and most of our buildings have tumbled stone from stone, so those of us who are left skulk like rats in the ruins; even if, for a time, our very spirits were tormented without cease by deceitful images springing from that dark part of ourselves humanity must always consent to ignore if we are to live in peace together; although unreason has run rampant through our streets, nevertheless, reason can – will – must! restore order in the end. For light to guide us, we have nothing but our reason. Night and day, day and night, we are tirelessly at work on the immediate problem before us. Our only weapon in the fight is inflexible rationalism and, since we brought reason into the battle, already the clocks have agreed to tell us the same time once more and, already –’

The tape registered a roaring, splintering crash and after that it was perfectly empty. It ran hissing on until the Doctor switched the machine off.

‘Reason cannot produce the poetry disorder does,’ he remarked without enthusiasm. ‘And he thinks I only operate in the gaps between things and definitions! What scant respect he shows for me!’

But I was silent for the resolute yet unhysterical timbre of the Minister’s voice had brought back all kinds of dimly remembered certitudes, certain forgotten harmonies that had once moved me as deeply as I was capable of being moved.

I found the paraphernalia of the Doctor’s science disgusted me when I saw it face to face. And his cold eyes perturbed me. I knew he could never be my master. I might not want the Minister’s world but I did not want the Doctor’s world either. All at once I was pitched on the horns of a dilemma, for I was presented with two alternatives and it seemed to me that the Doctor must be wrong for neither alternative could possibly co-exist with the other. He might know the nature of the inexhaustible plus but, all the same, he was a totalitarian. And I was in this unhappy position – I, of all men, had been given the casting vote between a barren yet harmonious calm and a fertile yet cacophonous tempest.

Well, you know the choice I made. Nothing in this city quarrels with its name. The clocks all run on time, every one. Time moves forward on the four wheels of the dimensions just as it always did before the Doctor’s time. When I finish this chapter, they will bring me a cup of hot milk and a plate of lightly buttered digestive biscuits; when I finish my life, they will bring me a winding sheet and take me to a vault in the Cathedral. They have reconstructed the Cathedral so well you would not believe it had ever been demolished. I will never see her again. The shadows fall immutably. In the square, the chestnut tree casts leaves of autumn on my statue’s shoulders. The golden bowl is not broken in this city. It is round as a cake and everyone may have a slice of it, according to his need. A need is nothing like a desire.

Old Desiderio asks young Desiderio: ‘And when he offered you a night of perfect ecstasy in exchange for a lifetime’s contentment, how could you possibly choose the latter?’

And young Desiderio answers: ‘I am too young to know regret.’

But it was not as simple as that, of course. It is not even as though I have been contented. Yet others have certainly been contented. Nothing excessive, mind – always only a gentle contentment. Yet, because of what I did, everybody is relatively contented because they do not know how to name their desires so the desires do not exist, in accordance with the Minister’s theory. So I suppose that, all in all, I acted for the common good. That is why they made a hero of me, although I did not know at the time I acted for the common good. Perhaps I acted only on impulse. Perhaps he did not offer me a high enough price; after all, he only offered me my heart’s desire.

Besides, he was a hypocrite.

He penned desire in a cage and said: ‘Look! I have liberated desire!’ He was a hypocrite. So I, a hypocrite on a less dramatic scale, I hypocritically killed him, did I?

But there I go again – running ahead of myself! See, I have ruined all the suspense. I have quite spoiled my climax. But why do you deserve a climax, anyway? I am only trying to tell you exactly, as far as I can remember, what actually happened. And you know very well already that it was I who killed Dr Hoffman; you have read all about it in the history books and know the very date far better than I because I have forgotten it. But it must have been October because the air smelled of mushrooms.

I would have hated him less if he had been less bored with his inventions.

‘The source of eroto-energy is, of course, inexhaustible, as my early colleague and co-researcher, Mendoza, surmised.’

He pointed through the window to the transmitter that turned ceaselessly at the top of the cliff beside the house.

‘For the last five years those transmitters, powered by simple, radiant energy, e.g. eroto-energy, have been beaming upon the city the crude infrastructure of

(a) synthetically authentic phenomena;

(b) mutable combinations of synthetically authentic phenomena; and have also been transmitting

(c) sufficient radiation to intensify a symbol until it becomes an object according to the law of effective evolving, or, if you prefer a rather more explicit term, complex becoming.

‘By the liberation of the unconscious we shall, of course, liberate man. And the naked man will walk in and out of everybody’s senses.’

But he was one of those people it is impossible to imagine without their clothes. He was taken by a fit of coughing which he smothered in a spotless white handkerchief.

‘The positive is an involved correlative of the negative and, once desire
is
endowed with synthetic form, it follows inevitably that thought and object operate on the same level. This is basic to –’

And this was the man whose daughter had told the Minister to go in fear of abstractions! I interrupted him; I had a question.

‘And whatever really happened to Mendoza?’

‘Mendoza?’

The Doctor took down a jar from a shelf. It contained a human brain floating in formaldehyde.

‘This is all we managed to salvage. He was horribly scarred. Whatever happened in his time-machine, it burned him to the bone and also utterly disordered his mind. He lingered on, raving, for five days before he died in the public ward of a charitable hospital. Mendoza and I had not been on speaking terms for years, of course. But I managed to obtain his brain as I was most curious to see it. However, whatever it had contained died five days before the rest of him and the structure was no different from that of any other brain.’

Somehow I found this recital exceedingly unnerving. He replaced the jar and smiled as well as he was able.

‘Now let me take you down to visit the distilling plant and the reality modifying machines. I’m sure you’ll find the reality modifying machines perfectly fascinating; they actually perform the preliminary stages in the synthesis of phenomena.’

He might have been inviting me on a guided tour round a chocolate factory. I wondered why his daughter loved him. The Count had suited my notion of Prometheus far better than the real Prometheus did; yet, now and then, the half-derisive contempt I felt for this prim thief of fire was touched with a horrid shudder when I remembered he was triple-refined Mind in person and Matter was an optical toy to him. But I could not understand why a man like him should want to liberate man so much. I could not see how he could have got that notion of liberation inside his skull. I was sure he only wanted power.

Perhaps I killed him out of incomprehension.

We descended to the underground levels of the castle in another businesslike electric elevator which took us a great distance below the earth before it stopped. Here, where the dungeons should have been, there were white-tiled corridors soundlessly floored with black rubber and lit by strip lighting far more brightly than day. All was technological whiteness and silence. Presently he pressed a button which released the catch on an impassive-looking metal door. We entered a busy, deserted laboratory filled with the apparatus of a distillery. The glass vats and tubes were bubbling with a faintly luminous, milky, whitish substance.

‘We need not linger here but I thought you would like a glimpse of it. This is merely the distilling plant. Here, the secretions of fulfilled desire are processed to procure an essence which has not yet pullulated into germinal form. Even with an electron microscope it is impossible to detect the slightest speck of root, seed or fundament in this, as it were, biochemical metasoup and it is safe to say we have cooked up for ourselves in our glass casseroles a pure, uncreated essence of being.

‘Now, what do we do with our metasoup? Why, we precipitate it. Come this way.’

The wall of the distilling plant opened to let us through and closed again behind us.

‘Allow me to introduce,’ said Hoffman with a pale smile, ‘my reality modifying machines.’

The machines operated with only an occasional, internal, twanging murmur; they could have been making electronic music. They were six cylindrical drums of stainless steel rotating on invisible axes with the same ceaseless, terrifying serenity of the transmitters turning, now, perhaps a mile above our heads, for we had penetrated very deeply into the earth. The drums were as tall as a man and perhaps three feet in circumference, with a shuttered viewing window in each base. A ridged, plastic pipe emerged from the white-tiled wall to disappear into a sealed aperture in the top of each drum and the wires which led from them appeared to feed into six glowing screens a confusion of endlessly swelling and diminishing ectoplasmic shapes formed around central nuclei of flashing lights. These screens were something like TV screens and formed a bank in the wall above complicated panels of switches on the other side of the laboratory.

Though the room was brightly lit and obviously in use, the only signs of the existence of a staff of technicians were a water cooler, a number of tubular steel chairs and a table containing a number of clipboards. It was a very sterile place.

‘These machines were formulated on the model of objective chance, taking “objective chance” as the definition of the sum total of all the coincidences which control an individual destiny. Just like the transmitters, they are powered by eroto-energy so their action is further modified by the Mendoza effect, that is, the temporal side-effect of eroto-energy.

‘Inside the reality modifying machines, we precipitate essence of being.’

He snapped open one of the viewing windows and I glimpsed a whirling darkness shot through with brilliant sparks, like the sky on a windy night. But he closed the window again immediately.

‘During the precipitation process, the essence of being spontaneously generates the germinal molecule of an uncreated alternative. That is, the germinal molecule of objectified desire.’

He paused to allow me to absorb this information. I would have expected any other man to show a certain modest pride as he exhibited devices that could utterly disrupt human consciousness but Dr Hoffman displayed only a faded weariness and a depressing ennui. He paused to take a drink of water from the water-cooler, crumpled up his used cardboard cup dispiritedly and sighed.

‘Inside the reality modifying machines, in the medium of essential undifferentiation, these germinal molecules are agitated until, according to certain innate determinative tendencies, they form themselves into divergent sequences which act as what I call “transformation groups”. Eventually a multi-dimensional body is brought into being which operates only upon an uncertainty principle. These bodies appear on the screen… over there… expressed in a complex notation of blips and bleeps. It requires extreme persistence of vision to make sense of the code at this stage. Nevertheless, those formless blobs are, as it were, the embryos of palpable appearances. Once these undifferentiated yet apprehendable ideas of objectified desire reach a reciprocating object, the appearance is organically restructured by the desires subsisting in latency in the object itself. These desires must, of course, subsist, since to desire is to be.’

So
that
was the Doctor’s version of the cogito! I DESIRE THEREFORE I EXIST. Yet he seemed to me a man without desires.