| The unnamed Narrator
of this novel had become the bureaucratic Governor of The Emergency Settlement
of the Western Quadrant, a government-established enclave of refuge for
its citizens in a time of war and social collapse. But eventually the
Settlement itself collapses. The Governor alone remains. He begins to
keep a journal. That journal constitutes the novel.
• • •
Who am I writing to?
To whom? The whole history of literature and its audience, an acrobatics
of the image and the word. The idea. How can a writing with no reading
ever live? Are there others like me now composing out of no discernible
motive, notes in the first person like a narrative? In the second person
as though I needed some other self with which to discuss it all? So I
in him. You invent him. Second person familiar. I’m the audience.
No, you are the audience. No. There is no more audience. I accept it.
I’ve come full circle, writing on parchment, on stone, on a cave
wall, spitting pigment over my outspread hand. They were from the south,
remember? Oh, I remember very well. I remember most vividly the sprockets
the chains on their machines. Why do I go on to describe them as though
I were writing for even one person? My own memory is sufficiently raised
by just a mention of them. I write for the page now, for some abstract
thing called "the narrative"? First Guillemette came to my office
to get permission from me to do the performance publicly. She sat on the
other side of my desk drawing sketches of their machines. "Macchine,"
she called them, "antiche macchine." Machines as old as the
story her group of machinists/actors would tell. Big machines, ten, twelve
feet tall, on wooden wheels, with low bicycle seats on which a machinist/actor
would sit pedaling the huge contraption into the middle of the old square.
One of the machines with intertwined chains and pulleys would require
three machine operator/actors/pedalers. And each machine, with its round
wooden wheels, its cranks its pulleys its bicycle chains would support
an enormous, fairy-tale sized construction of an insect made of wire and
colorful papers that would snap, flap, clap.
Guillemette drew diagrams of each machine/insect. Steel and paper and
cloth to make red green yellow orange insects. One machine would have
a platform at the top, ten feet in the air, with an actress on it.
Asking my permission! Artists asking the Bureaucrat’s permission
to fulfill their vision at a time in history when Bureaucracy was already
a heap of tepid ashes, if anyone would only look at it to see. I assumed
my role. I examined all her drawings. I studied them. Formally, I granted
her official permission with the full-hearted support of the entire Department,
the whole Government-in-extremis.
Guillemette kept me apprised throughout the four months of building their
insect-machines. The pilfering of metal, steel, cloth, wood, paper. For
all of which I signed documents of permission. But no such document existed.
Abanno made officious fakes for me. I signed them, gave them to Guillemette,
told her to use them sparingly. She offered to dedicate the performance
to me, "The Enlightened High Prince of the Emergency Settlement"
she dubbed me. Looking back on it now I think I was right not to disillusion
her, not to abandon my post simply because I knew it no longer existed.
It was delightful for me to issue fabricated requisition slips for scraps
or equipment the Il Gruppo della Macchine di Ferro could have stolen from
unguarded heaps, bought on the black market, found in abandoned houses
without permission from my office. With these requisition papers the performance
had already begun. Each presentation of false documents to Guillemette
a short act in the drama. A comedy farce as though each time my face were
painted an absurd bright exaggeration. Thus I became a member of the Il
Gruppo della Macchine Vive and thus I performed those bureaucratic acts
which gave me the most pleasure and thus I the bureaucrat learned that
all pleasure partakes of madness, pantomime, silliness, transgression,
and the validation of the seemingly false which is actually not the true
false.
The performance took place on a sunny day. The first thing I noticed when
I came to the square, among all the great awkward clumsy machinery of
a fly, a platform with a bed, a butterfly, a garden of flowers (that too
a machine, on wheels, though for some of the machines rubber wheels had
been found to replace wooden ones — where did they find rubber for
wheels!), a colorful dinosaur beast, two smaller dinosaur-cohorts, a spider,
a huge spider-web woven of rope — yet the first thing I noticed
when I came into the square that day was a 2-year old boy in a yellow
jumper chasing flocks of pigeons. He neither smiled nor grimaced nor laughed,
but was absorbed in his work without strain in his face.
The members of Il Gruppo della Macchine Imaginarie milled around their
machines. Lily found me in the crowd. Throughout the performance she held
my arm, even as I hurried around the square with the crowd, following
one machine or another.
Music began from loudspeakers. They had loudspeakers, they had a tape
deck, they had pieced together tapes from here and there!
Grammatico pedaled out the first machine: the platform with Guillemette
on top, in a bed asleep. He pedaled his contraption around the square,
gears and chains rolling. They hadn’t tried to hide the actors/machinists/pedalers.
They weren’t costumed. The rough apparatus of the theater was bared.
It was theater. The crowd applauded, running to get out of the way of
the oncoming great machine, while still hovering as close to it as they
could. Atop this first machine, Guillemette awoke in her bed. She stretched.
She took in the day. She was a Child awakening from a Child’s bed.
Everything she saw delighted her. She yawned and giggled and stretched.
The music played on. The crowd followed. T-shirted, sweating, Grammatico
worked at the big flat pedals, rolling the wooden-wheeled machine over
the cobbled square. Guillemette looked up at the sky, sighed like a child,
clasped her hands to her breast. (It was even better that Guillemette
was in her late fifties, making no effort to hide the age in her face
with make-up. She wore a young girl’s bed-clothes, but otherwise,
like the machines, she did not hide the flesh and human machinery of the
theater.) Grammatico pedaled the machine past the flower-garden (wooden
petunias, cosmos, lavender on great 15-foot tall stems surrounded by leaves
of green grass — wherever did the paint come from?). In exaggerated
gestures, Guillemette inhaled the flowering scents, threw out her arms
as if to embrace the garden in her Child’s bosom. Grammatico kept
her moving. She sighed. She laughed. The crowd followed her. Bravo! Applause.
Delight.
Klaus, from the sidelines, pedaled his machine into the scene. A fly.
It swiped by Guillemette, she swiped it away. It buzzed her, she shooed
it off. It flew around in the air, the crowd shooing it off as well. Then
Pasquale came in fast on his contraption. A bee. The music turned dark,
threatening. (Where did they get that music?) Pasquale pedaled quickly
toward the circling platform-bed. Furiously Guillemette flailed her arms
fending off the danger until the attending bee discovered the garden,
where it hummed in ecstasy among the euphoric odors, delirious, happy
as the dew was wet as the pollen was sweet. The music became bucolic —
one flute. By the time the crowd heard Atthonis howl his first fierce
cry, by the time they turned to see him enter the square, he had already
taken a good head start from a ways back. Here he came, not sitting but
standing, pedaling, shouting great cries, huge groans, his face red-flushed
with passion with fury with unleashed wide open violence. His hands gripped
and shook the metal tubes of his machine so that the giant spider atop
it trembled while its legs rose and fell climbing over the air, the bed,
Guillemette’s head, on toward the fly which it herded, terrified,
in to the spider’s web but didn’t stop no it turned with renewed
bloodfed fury to the garden to fill its greed to force the bee through
the clustered flowers out into the open then drove the bee toward the
web where the fly, struggling, entangled itself deeper while Atthonis
yelled, screamed, drove, pedaled, shook while the crowd, hushed, followed
the machines of this lyric turned dramatic while the music became rhythmic,
strong-beated.
The spider devoured the fly then the trapped bee, the spider and the bee
both collapsing by the pulling in of pulleys, strings, folding wings and
legs, then withdrawing from the scene, all the while poor Guillemette
screamed in her little-girl’s high-pitched voice while no one came
to her aid while the crowd ran around the square wanting to strike out
at the beast at the spider but not.
Guillemette collapsed in tears, in defeat. Sobbed. The crowd became limp.
Grammatico slowed the pace of his circling cycle. The chains cranked around
the gear-wheels. Could Il Gruppo della Macchine Fantasmagoriche cloud
the sky with darkness they would have. I’m sure now knowing them
as I came to know them that they must have considered how to manipulate
the clouds, to fill them with darkening moisture. I’m sure they
only lacked enough time to figure it out. The show had to go on. The skies
stayed lightened, white and blue. I wanted heavy cumulistic clouds to
move in; I wanted to see that Il Gruppo della Macchina Famosa could organize
truly the wind and the rain, the clouds, the skies, the light and dark
of the earth in her atmosphere. I began to want desperately for that transformation
to be possible, to be effected by my friends in Il Gruppo della Macchine
Terribili. I wanted a change at the very core of universal order, didn’t
I? Nothing in the atmosphere changed. Amid the chaos of the machines rolling
over the plaza, the noise of the crowd in appreciation, delight, fear,
the screaming of the Child-Guillemette up on her platform-bed, the violence
of the spider/fly-bee battle, I stood amid the riot of my own desires
aroused, and so standing and watching, I noticed in fact a preternatural
stillness in the air, the temperature, the foliage around us, the light,
as though the universe did respond by command of Il Gruppo della Macchine
Soprannaturale by precisely its stillness into which even the growth of
plant or tree or grass or herb was incorporated.
Guillemette wept, the crowd (and not the sky) darkened, slowing with the
slowed pace of Grammatico’s pedaling. Standing still there I succumbed
to a panic, a fear which became a terror-of-abandonment, of aloneness
as though at that moment when my actual breath changed pace and depth
I in some way lost what I call consciousness which is what, really? A
sense of connection to others? A sense of purpose, motivation? A sense
of time? I had felt that very same terror at a few other moments previously
in my life, not usually directly associated with surrounding events. But
the terror — or rather succumbing to the terror, was pleasure, release
as if release by some obtuse osmosis of my own terror into the stillness
of that moment. Now I am in actuality abandoned, alone. Without purpose
or time. And? Now, as I write, the sensation of that terror seems a luxury
I wish I could retrieve.
As Guillemette recovered from her grief three actors/pedalers: Angela,
Rahad, and Simond — carefully coordinating their joint labors —
brought forward the three-pedaler dragon-machine. The beast was a huge
lizard of reds, dark blues, purples. It had claws the size of my body.
Guillemette summoned it to her. It rolled forward to her command. Now
two others in the Troupe, Hwang and Samson came out on foot onto the plaza
to yell orders at the pedalers, guide their machines, direct the oncoming
action.
As the Dragon-Beast approached, Child-Guillemette transformed, she was
the Queen of the Underworld, the Goddess of Vengeance, the Sword of Truth.
The Beast fawned on her, she rubbed its flanks, snout, neck. She raised
her arms over the Beast, her eyes enlarging, her mouth turned, and by
the Power vested in her by Primordial Innocence, she gave the Dragon-Beast
the perverse blessing it hungered for. Spreading wide her now powerful
arms, she cried out to it. She commandeered it, enlisted it, knighted
it, then she sent it off into battle.
The Dragon-Beast’s two lizardy lieutenants attacked the Spider from
back and front, with claws, teeth, talons, body thrusts. But within minutes
the enormous Spider had shredded them, dropped them to the ground, the
weight of their great greenish paper bodies felling the two actors, Michealis
and Marisius under them. Hwang and Samson, the ground crew, rushed over
to unstrap the animals, Michealis and Marisius slipping out, then the
four of them carried the sub-beasts off the plaza.
In the chaos of this death the Spider had disappeared. But surely enough
he returned with another howling rush from the streets off-stage as Atthinas
pedaled like a madman from hell, the Great Spider’s host of legs
shaking, his Great Spider’s body raging. The battle between Spider
and Dragon-Beast took place all over the plaza. Back and forth. Round
and round. Four people pedaling their Macchine del Terrore with pure primal
animus. All civilization unbounded from its confines. All joy, comfort,
sweetness banished from earth. Guillemette shouted her Favorite on, dancing
slow-limbed big-arched movements in the absolute glory of her bestial
power. The crowd stood back away, watched from a circle around the plaza
which broke if the two Beasts even threatened to come near. Then in one
move as the spider left his head and his neck outstretched in an overreach
the Dragon-Beast bit with the power of his down-swooping teeth to the
spider’s exposed neck, the spider’s severed head smashing
to the ground.
Atthonis, maneuvering the spider, had to accomplish this decapitation
with latches on strings. He pedaled back, then forth, then slowly, slowly
backwards. Then gone. Beside the square, out of the action, Atthonis sat
in the crude driver’s seat of his once fierce, now beheaded machine.
Bravo! Bravo! (Was it the Bravo! the brilliant killing of the spider or
Bravo! the adroit performances of the Il Gruppo della Macchine Soprannaturale?)
It was not the same crowd who had given applause, approval, enthusiasm
to the first appearance of the colorful machines. It was a crowd now moved
by a different passion.
The music, which had been basic, became color-filled, pianistic, complex
lyrically, rhythmically. Guillemette, pedaled by Grammatico, circled the
plaza with the garden machine circling around her. The Beast approached
Guillemette. She bowed her gratitude. She kissed the Beast’s cheeks.
She knighted him with the invisible medals of her now-gracious Sovereignty.
The hegemony of peace drew the crowd’s softer applause.
There. The narrative is achieved. Afterwards, walking back home alone
through the emptied square I saw the couple again, the boy and girl from
my first day. They were on a bench, kissing. Only now they seemed drunk.
I’m sure they were. They were all over each other in an absent lust.
Groping, entangled, licking, kicking. They seemed to me lost, purposeless,
like two wild teenagers anxious to destroy by scorn by the embrace of
disillusionment the whole construct of the world. I went home to change
before going out to look for Lily, who had disappeared into the crowd.
I didn’t realize she actually had gone off until I couldn’t
find her after the performance. Swept up into that celebration into which
Guillemette and the Troupe drew me — The Enlightened Prince of The
Emergency Settlement, they called me, His Most Bountiful Beneficence,
His Excelling Excellence, and so on as they reveled — I glanced
around for her.
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