Dadaoism (An Anthology)

by Oliver, Reggie

  The bathroom. He shuffles in bleary-eyed, his head hung. He showers and brushes his teeth. In the kitchen he brews a pot of coffee and empties it into a plastic thermos. He packs his lunch: a low-fat frozen dinner and an apple. He descends the narrow staircase and exits onto the street, locking the door behind him.

  Dinnertime. The city swarms with families and mall-shoppers, drunken students. There are happy couples, men in their thirties walking with wives and partners ten years younger. He watches the women with the hunger of a voyeur, meeting their eyes, hoping again for a flash of recognition, that one brief spark.

  One woman in particular. He notices her when she is still several yards away: dark-haired and petite, her ears weighted by silver hoop earrings. He holds her gaze as she approaches. Her eyes widen with apparent curiosity. Blue.

  Hi? she says, a little shakily.

  He averts his gaze—fearful, ashamed—and slips past without speaking, unable to drag his eyes from the street. Head down, he forces himself to keep walking, legs aching though he dare not slacken his pace. By the time he reaches the station, he is nearly out of breath. He boards the bus and collapses in a seat near the back.

  He sits with his face to the window. Women drift half-clad across the glass, blurring into insignificance as the bus takes on speed.

  Their eyes dwindle to points before disappearing.

  9. Later

  At 5:00, he prepares the nightly alignment check, transferring the test wafer from one tray to another. He performs the task with the aid of a vacuum wand: a pencil-sized rod capped by a suction nozzle that can be switched off and on by a thumb trigger.

  Using the wand, he turns over the disc and notes the way light strikes its reverse side, pushing in ripples across the surface. Only then does his nightmare return to him. Cast up in fragments: shells and sea glass, polished stones left by a wave’s retreat.

  Sunset over a colorless city, a sprawling metropolis formed from silicon. He remembers the silver roadways, the tower-like transistors joined by a network of conductive pathways, copper skywalks suspended thousands of feet above the ground. The towers radiated an audible tension, rocking along their foundations, swaying from side to side like a congregation in the throes of song: arms outstretched, braced in expectation of the descending spirit.

  Ozone. He could smell it in the air around him, exuded by every structure and surface. The stench intensified the longer he stood there, paralyzed, watching the sky draw down toward its western boundary: craving annihilation, a darkness that would not come, would never.

  His vision clouds and dims. When he blinks to clear it, he is surprised to find that he is still holding the alignment wafer. He eases the disc into place and releases the vacuum trigger, loading the tray into the photo tool before returning to his workstation.

  He opens his browser and links to Project Gutenberg. Fear and Trembling. He forces himself to focus on the lines of printed text, reading the prologue without comprehension until the screen winks dark as with the closing of a shutter and the words fade from view, delivering him once more through the jaws of sleep.

  10. Evacuation

  The fire-bell screams from concealed speakers, scattering sleep like whorls of blowing sand. His eyes snap open. A page from Project Gutenberg is displayed on his computer screen. Fear and Trembling unfolds before him, shaped from coils of plain text.

  The alarm continues to ring, cutting through the fog of his confusion, sounding the first strains of panic inside him. Bulbs flash from an adjacent corridor, lighting the route to the emergency exit. The tool alarms are beeping, faint and tinny beneath the peal of the fire-bell. Their display panels blink from red to black.

  His co-workers file into the Photo Lab, faces masked by hoods and veils. The column snakes past his workstation and bends the near corner, disappearing. He stands and steps back from the computer. Pushes in his chair. His supervisor claps him on the back. C’mon now, the man says, taking him by the elbow. Let’s go. You know the rules.

  He allows himself to be led and falls into step beside the others. Aimless—mindless—he is swept up into the silent procession and carried along, borne endlessly down a sequence of stuttering corridors to the emergency exit.

  Outside, his co-workers assemble to be counted. The night is muggy and hot. He removes his veil, breathing deeply even as the sweat begins to run like sap beneath his clothes.

  The fire alarm is still ringing. Exterior lights flicker down the length of the windowless factory, transforming the one-story building into a landing strip, a runway for the planes that wing overhead, too high to be heard, passing for stars in the half-light of the city sky.

  11. A Conversation

  Twenty minutes later, the all clear has not been given. He wanders through the crowd, turning sideways to edge past groups of chattering women, men milling hood-less and revealed. He overhears pieces of conversation: baseball, NASCAR, the latest news from Iraq.

  He looks for her brown eyes, her burned ID—the traces left by a being made of fire. So far their meetings have been unplanned, illogical. For this reason he wonders if he might find her here, outside where there is no order or pattern, no walls to mirror the knots in his mind.

  He fumbles forward, glancing from badge to badge, nearly falling. He plows into the back of another white-clad shape, a thin man with blond hair. The other man apologizes and turns back to his friends.

  She is not here, he thinks. She is nowhere but in the labyrinth—and nothing without it. Eventually, he emerges from the crowd and drops cross-legged in the high grass. The lawn stretches before him, speckled with candy wrappers and discarded coffee cups. A breeze blows steadily from the south, fanning away the August heat.

  It is another minute before he realizes that he is not alone. Ten feet away, the tip of a cigarette hovers in the dark. It belongs to an older woman: heavyset, nearing sixty. She exhales a cloud of smoke, her face vanishing until she draws again. The orange glow bends back across her wasted features, wiping the shadows from her eyes. She steps toward him.

  Evening, she says. She offers him the pack, but he refuses. What department you in? I don’t think I’ve seen you around before—and I know most everyone round here.

  Photo, he says.

  How long you been there?

  Six months.

  I’m Annie, she says. I work in Wafer Prep—been there more than thirty years. Hell, I probably couldn’t have been much older than you when I started.

  She takes a contemplative puff, smoke curling from her nostrils.

  Oh? he says, if only to say something. Is that right?

  Her eyes narrow. You find that hard to believe?

  No—I—

  She smiles. Relax, she says. I’m just fucking around. I was young once, the same as you, but that was a long time ago. I’ve been doing this way too long.

  She drags, exhales. Her eyes brighten, vanish.

  Is this the first time there’s been a fire? he asks.

  Fire? Her surprise is obvious. It’s just a drill, honey. Nothing to worry about.

  He blinks. Oh—no. Of course not.

  There hasn’t been a fire for as long as I’ve been here. Before that, maybe, but I doubt it—anyway, that’s getting back into the Seventies.

  He breathes in sharply, swallowing his nervousness. Do you know—Kara? he asks, guessing at the rest of the name. She works in Prep, I think.

  Kara? She shakes her head. Nope. Don’t know anyone with that name—not that works round here, anyway.

  She has brown eyes, dark hair…

  I’m sorry, she says. But I don’t think I know her.

  Oh. I must be thinking of someone else.

  Must be.

  A murmur spreads through the gathered crowd. The men shrug and spit. Some trade muttered curses before donning their hoods. Back to the shit, one of them jokes, a young man scarcely younger than he is.

  You hear that? Annie says. That’ll be the all clear. Didn’t I say? Just a drill.

&n
bsp; She stubs out her cigarette and drifts off to join her department, one ghost among many and utterly indistinguishable. After she has gone he gets to his feet and mops the damp from his forehead. It is after 6:00. Sunrise is imminent. The air is lightening, black to gray. The breeze dies with the renewal of the summer heat, withdrawing through flowering weeds, fading to leave a tense silence, the whiff of smoke from a crushed ember.

  12. Last Day

  He gives his notice.

  His supervisor appears disappointed at the news. The man leans back against his chair, hands clasped behind his head with one foot extended to rest against the corner of the desk. I’m sorry to hear that, he says. I’d hoped to have you for some time yet.

  He nods. I’m sorry too.

  Have you got another job lined up? Something else you want to do?

  No, he says, truthfully. Nothing like that.

  The other man raises his eyebrows. He removes his glasses and rubs at his exposed eyes, exhaling through half-puffed cheeks. That’s alright, he says after a time. Hell, I’d say it was normal at your age. Wouldn’t you?

  He shrugs. Maybe.

  Tell you what: why don’t you plan to work through the end of the week? That should give me the time I need to find someone else. That sound alright to you?

  Okay.

  The week passes uneventfully. He spends his final night re-reading Lovecraft’s dream cycle. Nyarlathotep. The Quest of Iranon. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. He has given up on Kierkegaard. He is through with deliberating.

  At 7:00, he rises and logs off from the computer. He stalks out of the workroom and makes for the exit, seeing no one, saying nothing. In the changing room he removes his boots and clean suit, his hood and veil. The gloves come last. He tugs them off and balls them away into the trashcan.

  In the glare of the changing room, he looks down at his hands and feels as though he is seeing them for the first time. The knuckles are bruised, the fingertips withered: ridged and wrinkled, the hands of a crone. On his way out, he pauses at the mirror. A stranger’s face stares back at him from the glass, the eyes softened, as in pity.

  13. Bus Stop

  A security guard meets him in reception. The man collects his badge and escorts him outside. I’m sorry about this, he says. But it’s just procedure—you understand.

  The automatic doors part before him, withdrawing with a respirator-like hiss. He emerges into the cool of the morning. He glances behind him, but the guard has gone.

  Down the sidewalk. He skirts the edge of the factory and rounds the corner, bringing the bus stop into view. He expects to find it empty—much as he has found it throughout his time in the clean room—but today there is someone else. A young woman sits, slouched, on the far end of the bench. She reclines with feet thrust out before her, the toes pointed upward.

  He sits down next to her, the length of the bench dividing them. She turns. He recognizes her immediately. Her brown eyes. Her black hair: long and straight and swept back from her forehead. Her complexion is pale, nearly luminous. She regards him blankly, her expression somber—delicate and composed like the face of a doll.

  She is wearing her ID badge. It appears new, the corner undamaged, unburned. The photo-side faces outward. He leans closer to make out the name. Emira.

  She nods. Her lips curl into the beginnings of a smile, though her eyes remain oddly flat, impossibly brown at this early hour.

  He didn’t realize he had spoken aloud.

  14. His Confession

  Sometimes, in dreams, I wander the byways of an unbounded city, a jumble of maze-like streets paved with silicon and copper. Transistors rise like towers from the sprawl, scraping against limitless space, so tall they bend and conform to the curve of the sky. A world in readiness: all awaits the Tester’s Spark, the nudge of the First Mover.

  Other nights I dream of the Spark itself. It appears to me as a chiseled point, a glittering tumescence at the limits of my vision. As I watch, it shears down one side, lengthening from itself to form a curling filament, a line of colorless light that opens toward me, unspooling rapidly, growing brighter, hotter, larger: a sun inching toward nova. And then it’s upon me.

  In that moment there is only the Spark and the birth-scream that ensues. The tongue liquefies, running to fire, but the scream, uttered once, never fades. Even now I hear it in the moments before sleep, rebounding from the city’s high-rises, the unseen hills beyond: a song of praise from a soulless gargoyle, no different from the cries of the unnumbered seraphim.

  For years I craved illumination, to be transformed by the Testing Spark. I wanted to be reborn, made new, like the angels who sing and dissolve in the ecstasy of inferno. I half-believed that you were one of them. A seraph, I mean. A creature born of fire. And in you I sought escape, a transfiguration in which I no longer believed.

  But you and I—we're not any different, are we? We are both trapped, imprisoned in the same labyrinth with the beast at its center, a sanctified daemon no less terrifying for being an invention. His cruelty is boundless—heartless—endless. Animated by the spark of life, you burn away with every moment, only to be animated again, instantly. There are no gaps between sparks, no time for rest. Even the theologians realize there can be no such thing. He is the First Tester—there can be no Last.

  What refuge is there but in darkness? To wink off. Neither the either nor the or. I have spent my entire life screaming, singing, burning. Twenty-one years. It is enough. I’m leaving tonight and I’m going home. Home. Finally I understand where that is—where it isn’t.

  For in nothingness alone I will seek deliverance: the rescue I once imagined and the oblivion I’ll find. I feel it now. An emptiness closer than my heartbeat. An absence bound in bones and skin. Never there, but always waiting, spun down these twisting corridors like the thread of my salvation—

  15. Morning

  She examines him closely, her gaze studied, serious. A moment passes. She smiles and shrugs and looks down at her sneakers. The laces are orange.

  I am sorry, she says, her voice thickly accented. But I do not understand.

  That’s okay, he says. I don’t either. Most of the time.

  She shakes her head. No, she says, more forcefully. It is my English. It is—bad.

  Oh.

  She smiles again. I am sorry, she repeats. She stands and steps to the edge of the sidewalk, where she balances on her heels, toes protruding from the curb. She wiggles her feet in a childlike manner, orange laces flashing back the sun.

  The bus, she says. It is late?

  He looks down at his watch. 7:40.

  Yeah, he says. It’s late.

  The east is bright, too bright. The sun expands as it rises, bulging hideously, swelling from itself until it blots out the summer sky. Soon it is no longer yellow but white, a dazzling shade that borders on black.

  He closes his eyes.

  NOISES

  Joe Simpson Walker

  If you make a man’s life impossible he’s liable to do something desperate. Harper had been desperate for a long time. Now, at just after eight in the morning, he stood hunched against the inside of his front door and tried to tell whether anything was going on in the passage.

  His mind struggled with the other noises. The barking dog. The voices from neighbouring flats on the ground floor, that came through his walls at any level of volume, short of one person whispering into another’s ear—maybe at that level, even. Footsteps from directly overhead—her footsteps, in her bare feet or stockings.

  Suddenly, everything stopped except the barking. The dog would go on from morning till night, in the yard of some house nearby. You might have been able to see it from Harper’s front window, but he never drew his blinds. He felt sorry for that dog. It barked and barked because it wasn’t getting what it needed. If he’d known exactly where it was he might have grassed the owners up to the RSPCA, anonymously. You had to be careful. He didn’t want to be beaten up in revenge. Even if the RSPCA said they’d deal with t
he matter in confidence, someone there might give him away. No one likes a snitch.

  His neighbour’s feet were moving again. And then it started:

  Thud. Hiss. Bunk-clunk, bunk-clunk. Bunk-clunk, bunk-clunk, bunk-clunk. A sound like a metallic throat-clearing, then a deep, dull beating that went on and on in a stumbling, irregular not-quite-rhythm, like a brain-damaged kid playing kettle drums. It was the water hammer, the noises of plumbing that within a minute seemed to be coming from everywhere, that began overhead before running through the entire building to penetrate his living space on all sides. The noises that she made happen.

  He couldn’t prove it. He’d had the plumbers out four times. They kept saying there was nothing wrong with the plumbing in his flat. No, he’d say, not in this flat there mightn’t be—but where was the noise coming from? It was no use talking to them. One guy said he hadn’t got the authorisation to go knocking at other flats. Couldn’t he get it? You’ll have to put in another complaint. This is the third fucking complaint I’ve made! But when he said so, Harper spoke in a tone of appeal and didn’t swear.

  The last guy he’d asked outright, could someone be making those noises on purpose? Could they keep it going a thousand times a day? Suppose there was more than one person doing it? Could they? The bloke shilly-shallied: he said yeah, then maybe, then said whoever did that would have to be short of something to do. Yeah? Well, some people are like that. They’ll fill up their empty lives with working out spite. They don’t need a reason, nor any courage; not when they’ve got a leader.

  The other neighbours backed her up. She was their leader. A fucking fat ugly woman Fuhrer, right above him.

  Her feet were on the move, padding away from where he stood. They were going into the other rooms, above his other rooms that she’d rendered uninhabitable. For weeks or months past, the sofa in his living room had been his bed. He used his bathroom once a day, to have a shit; for other purposes he used the kitchen sink. His bathroom was directly under hers, and he could hear every noise she made in there. He could hear her piss, and it wasn’t just because there was no soundproofing. You wouldn’t believe a human being could piss so loudly. And that wasn’t the worst noise she could produce.