Dadaoism (An Anthology)

by Oliver, Reggie

  *

  The golden frames of Professor Poubelle’s glasses can be seen glinting from far off before his face floats into view: a sick, milky apparition. Groping his way from out of a mound of rubbish at the edge of a subterranean forest, his two little hands feeling the dark air, each one quivering like the pink appendage at the end of a mole’s nose, the professor makes his way onto the path. His stout legs carry his considerable corpulence lurchingly. He is stuffed into a threadbare corduroy suit, which, because of its extensive wear, together with its color, recalls old wood. As he moves amidst trees, tree-like himself, his squashed, sagging face floats like an enormous glowworm, a tuft of dead gray hair at its apex, resembling lint in it its fuzzy, ruined state.

  *

  The classroom is square and small. It is painted pale green and it has one large, rectangular window set at the back. A mirror hangs on the opposite wall. At night, when class is in session, the window reflects an infinite series of mirrors for the professor to see. Contrarily, an infinite number of windows are reflected in the mirror behind the professor for his students to see. There is no door.

  “Professor, why is there a mirror behind you?”

  “Honh honh honh!” the professor declares, in an exaggerated French accent, “Mise en abyme, mon ami! Ah, my dearest pupils, I see such wonderment in the lackless blackness of your eyes! Such snide and beastly grins! And not a little fear! What little darlings! My moody little masks at sea, flushing violet with eagerness, doubt—all the obstinacy of octopuses, your cheeks as chilly—the oldest of you blushing black.”

  *

  Sometimes the professor would stop in the middle of his lecturing. Sometimes, mid-sentence, he’d trail off and his eyes would widen, focusing on a point that made him appear cross-eyed. Then they would begin to roll back and forth like the eyes of a sleeper who has entered into REM sleep but kept his lids up. These seeming trances he explained, one day, to his students.

  “Something you may have noticed, is that sometimes my eyes do something funny. What you probably have not noticed is the reason for this, so I will explain it to you, my pupils. You see, if you look carefully—and I invite you to come closer—there is a little spider on my eyeglass. It comes down from the ceiling…” Here Monsieur Poubelle gestured, an extravagant, even theatrical motion, which both indicated a large hole in the ceiling panel above his desk, and mimed—in its second part—a downward trickling with a wiggling of the fingers. This latter movement he sustained for some time, unnecessarily, almost as if he’d forgotten what he was doing. He went on as his fat, gray face stared frowningly,

  “This animal lands on one or the other of my lenses, and then the little beast busies itself rushing from one edge of my eyeglass to the other. It goes to and fro, to and fro—sometimes for the entire duration of my lecture. Then, always before our time’s up, it retreats, drawn backward and up into that crack up there, waving its legs like a little hand saying ‘goodbye...’”

  Someone snickered.

  The professor went on, in a trance; nonsensically he mumbled,

  “Concept or image of the thread, spider’s web, or light around which dust seems to gather, threatening it with corporeality, heaviness, gravity. Like a trapped angel in agony as it sprouts a skeleton, the ether rent. Renting forms from the ether, that or the reverse: forms rent by the great emptiness of their bones, like the emptiness of their atoms; the incredible, efficient lightness of avian skeletons, which tend toward air, to evaporating in the medium they’ve conquered, that is to say that now they be conquered in turn by their medium, with which necessity has made them so nearly perfectly composite. All the space in atoms. The air might grow a sparrow’s skeleton on its own, or a sparrow might lose its skeleton to the air, after all the air fills it, hollows it, and defines it. A story seems to appear only at an angle: the thread which, perfectly the same thread, but repeated, in a day, or ghost-like through centuries, always appearing to catch the light in just its certain way, in order to attract and densify the gathering dust. Miraculously appearing in the most dust-shrouded and ridiculous spaces, like a kind of joke. There isn’t any more sense to it than the patterns in light captured on the lens of a camera, evidence of the mechanized process of representation that appears in the image itself. It is merely the hallucinatory effect of a weird, perfect angle, the paranoid sprouting of perfect lines from the abdomens of orb weavers, barn spiders, etc. The eyes on owls’ wings, peacock feathers—or the eyes of owls or peacocks. The thought of an eye, without there actually ever having been eyes, a little paranoid, reduplicating seed that sees itself everywhere because it is nowhere. Everything returning to and re-rising from the woodwork, an illusory change of levels destroying itself incessantly; the constant perfectly patterned array of lights reflected in a dead, putrefying eye with a pupil as black and big as if put there by a bullet hole, an eye which putrefies to become perfect: a dead mirror knowing itself. Even as the body lies there unknowing, it knows itself, bereft of the things that came and went, mere distortions, fuzzier and more ridiculous than this new idiot, mechanical lucidity—and yet always this, or much less than this imagines it is more than it is, and grows thereby, through obscuring levels of it own unconsciousness, its ‘consciousness’ being no more than a cancer of paranoia, in all honesty—though honesty is something which it spares itself above all things—and thereby manages to seem to be, only on the basis of a paranoid sense that nothingness has of itself… no great human thing having occurred but the return of thought to this presence with itself, the paranoia of nothing. Am I? Am I? Am I? it says, but thereby it negates itself as not one with the seamlessness of eternity, it’s only truth, and becomes a mere suspension or absence—all one ever is, is this absence, this suspension in the churning tide, the ocean saying no, or know, to itself.”

  *

  The classroom is a cinderblock spaceship, the controls of which have failed. The fluorescent lights flicker a little in one corner of the room. It is very quiet. Hands worry pencils. The professor sits at his desk with a look of terrible finality on his putty-like face. He stares past his three pupils’ heads, past their reflections in the window, out into space. There is the sound of a zipper being pulled, Monsieur Poubelle grins.

  *

  A black streamer hangs from a partly collapsed porch, a porch lost to the overgrown lawn, like a ship sunk at the bottom of a weedy sea. Through a crooked window see the silhouettes of the dead boys gathering as they have their party. They go out to pass out in the grass, to be nibbled at by ants. Adolescent refuse, refuse of adolescents: vomit, plastic cups. Night in this woods, un-sifted through the fingers of day, has grown denser. The boys are playing in its dregs.

  *

  The dead boys are playing in fallout beneath an imaginary subterranean sun. They are building houses from trash and catching herpetic, three-eyed fish from a silver stream. They are rotting in itchy Christmas sweaters.

  *

  Rising slowly in the underground night, a great, dark dome, a cyclopean blackness lit from behind by spotlights. A black sun: the professor’s hot air balloon.

  To fly a hot air balloon beneath the earth! A precarious adventure, to be sure. And what a vessel is this! A curvaceous frame of whale bone dressed in black velvet and trimmed in white lace. The basket is held momentarily by what resemble the tightly stretched tendrils of an onyx octopus. These feeble anchors of black crepe, previously doused in Absinthe and presently set alight, are now snapping and burning. They coil blackly in the air like firework-snakes.

  High up, over the sprawling decrepitude of Trash Town, Monsieur Poubelle floats with all the funereal brilliance and pomp of an atmospheric elephant graveyard: an illusion suggested by the crazy bone ribbing of the craft, seen in the flaring of the balloon’s furnace through the black dome’s momentary transparency. And this hellish lantern is accompanied by the monstrous sound of a trumpet, or foghorn—a threatening Wagnerian announcement.

  White and small as maggots, the dead boys emerge fr
om their lairs, burrows, and forts. PFT! PFT! PFT! At the sight of Monsieur Poubelle’s craft some of the boys’ heads pop off like champagne corks. Ossified nets of sperm sink up into the scorched soil of the night. Cobwebs of purpose, of lust, blown like thistledown—wishes made on dead dandelions—form mildewed Milky Ways in the desiccated roots of topside Trash Town.

  From the black funnel of an iron dunce cap-turned megaphone, Monsieur Poubelle shrilly declares,

  “WHEN YOU HOLD ONE UPSIDE DOWN IN THE DARK AND LIT BY CANDLES, A SKULL IS LIKE A BALLROOM. THE CAVERNS OF THE EYES BECOME DIM CORNERS SCREENED OFF FOR CAPRICES. ITS INVERTED RICTUS IS A CHANDELIER!”

  Monsieur Poubelle pauses to clear a cobweb of jissom from the shadowed attic of his eyeglass and continues,

  “THAT RIGID, CARTOON ARMATURE OF THE HUMAN FACE QUICKLY HARBOURS DOZENS OF ODD LITTLE LIGHTS SHINING ON THE BONE: REVELERS IN THE BALLROOM OF THE SKULL! WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO GO TO THE PARTY? BUT YOU DAREN’T DO MORE THAN PUT YOUR TREMBLING HAND INSIDE YOUR OWN MOUTH TO TOUCH THE UNLIT UPSIDEDOWN CHANDELIER OF YOUR TEETH—WAITING TO BE PUT RIGHT AGAIN, ONE DAY, ABOVE THE CLOISTERED, CROOKED ROOMS THAT HOUSED YOUR LONELY EYES. THOSE CHAMBERS THAT, NOW VACATED, ARE READY FOR ALL KINDS OF COMPANY!”

  And just now, Professor Poubelle, that earl of grayness, who’d sown his stains deep in the festering brains of the dead boys, and who was now seeing them flower—crashes his craft into the roots above. The balloon bursts like the body of an octopus torn upon a reef of coral and everything falls down upon the refuse, burning, where it is snuffed by everything it does not ruin.

  *

  “Oh my god, what a faggot,” says Joachim, who has found and pulled out Tyler, transparent and rolled up in my pack. His gaze shifts from these remains to me, and I feel my arms wither and blacken. I am being drawn inwards, diminishing. Coldness in my belly, heat in my face.

  *

  After that it happens rapidly. A fur forms on my face, a heavy black matting of shiny hair. The light leaves my eyes and they break and scatter into subsets, rows: my forehead is dotted with a double diadem of black carbuncles, a nightmare tiara of blind eyes. Joachim and Robert can barley conceal their horror when one day my furry face cracks in half at the chin, up through where my nose used to be. My jawbone, now also thus divided, tapers to two hollow points—forming fangs which connect up with the glands in my throat, that—needless to say—are now full of poison. And all the while I blacken and shrink, my limbs multiplying around me like burnt matches.

  *

  “What do you want to do tonight?” asks Robert.

  “Let’s do something awful,” says Joachim. “It’s been awhile since I did something really awful.”

  *

  A curtain of lace in the hot last hours of a summer night, amidst the droning of a million or more cicadas, which have turned the forest into a kind of green rhythm machine with their buzzing. The distant sound of an organ is heard as the curtain of lace is drawn back. Moving in, a green light appears from behind the trees, illuminating the edge of an armoire that lies crookedly against a pine tree. Against that armoire lies another, at an angle. Against that armoire lies yet another, and a final one completes the enclosure that they’ve created, tilted inward towards each other and partly supported by trees so as to form a kind of room in the woods.

  Here, within and without, dresses cover the forest floor. In fabulous, crenellated waterfalls they’ve flooded the woods surrounding the armoires, webbed the trees with their lacy sleeves. And at the center of this nest of accoutrements and negligee: Robert and Joachim. Here they have been for three days, cloistered and drunk on my venom, which has created in them an urge towards web making. For this time, they’ve kept me in a mason jar. They take me out and hold me, pinched between the abdomen and thorax so that my eight legs are helpless to find purchase—and they place my furry mouth against their wrists or throats and squeeze and tease me till I can’t help but bite, reflexively. And so, every hour or so the curved onyx needles of my teeth break their thin, dead skin and flood the dry meat and capillaries beneath with poison. My venom makes Robert’s eyes glow green and they rocket through the dark like gangrenous ping-pong balls. My venom makes them dance: like an electrical current it causes the brittle remnants of their nervous systems to snap and jerk. Bit by bit cold muscles are dislodged from their bones and ribbons of fat fall to the floor as they unwrap themselves. Fingernails, teeth, and toes fall. They dance until they are almost nothing at all.

  They’ve hidden me at the back of the armoire; through a mauve slip I see Joachim’s hairy legs revolving slowly in burlesque parody. A crème-colored stocking is pulled up each leg by pale, black veined hands. Like grotesque misshapen grapefruits, his calves hang and twitch in his tights, jiggling with Charlie horses of decay.

  Suddenly the glass of my prison is fogged by Robert’s breath as he descends on me, crawling into the closet to restore his high. Out I’m brought into a chaos of bodices, empty bottles, and high heels—beneath the huge, watchful, blinded eye of a broken black clock hung high in the pine trees above this makeshift room. The clock is draped with yards of sanguine silk or mesh, forming a kind of tent around the armoires. Struggling little shapes are caught in the drapery: cicadas crippling themselves as they are jerked apart from their trapped legs alongside similarly ruined moths. Their plight is a consequence of their quest towards the light that illuminates this little, sordid circus—the light which comes from jars of bioluminescent flora and fauna: the nightlights of the great work of decay in the woods in the form of glow worms and bright mushroom kept in makeshift lamps like my prison. Jars of mushrooms glowing greenly beneath clouds of dying fireflies. There is a noxious and luminous lichen-like lining of nastiness around everything.

  This same emerald fungus has colonized the wounds in Joachim’s muscles, and his bruises glow brightly with yeasty patterns. There he stands in his pink tights in the posture of the part of a singer in a tragic opera, a dark stain flowering around the huge lump of his moldering sex. As if grasped and directed by a ghost’s hand his chin is turned up, his white face raised towards the broken clock. Robert’s manic giggling, which began as he grasped the jar that imprisons me, is hushed by a simple gesture from Joachim: a single finger brought up and down upon his fly-decorated pout. And anon, even the cicadas fall silent under the intense spell of our listening. And now it is—in the hush—that I realize I can hear the clock, and it emanates the weirdest noise I’ve ever known. A shifting dissolve that has its analogy, curiously, in the strange green patterns of Joachim’s almost paisley-like epidermal decay. This clock is indeed broken in the most curious way, such that we can hear the sound of each second winding down.

  “HARK! The music of dying time… the sound of the abyss that exists in each moment of every minute… the mesmerizing anti-music of dead and bottomless time…”

  Joachim intones the first word shrilly, and the subsequent twenty-six in falsetto, a sound made especially gross by the cracks of depth and ruin brought to it by the onset of decay.

  *

  A tarantula in a stocking, crushed in a slipper by a male foot. I’m ground into the floor as Robert shifts his weight, executing me in a clumsy pirouette.

  *

  Robert has stopped sleeping in his freezer and consequently things have moved into him. He has become increasingly febrile and lugubrious. One day he just gives up. Standing in a pair of grimy ripped up jeans he looks at himself in the mirror, at the hole something has gnawed in the pocket formed by his collarbone. With his headphones on, blasting the deafening rhythm from a skipping death metal track, he goes down to the sea, finding his way along the dark, jagged rocks with sputtering matches. Groping in the dark, he finds an extension cord and plugs it in. Movie lights flash on, illuminating a cove of black water edged with cliffs of black rock and a backdrop painted to look like the sea on a sunny day. The music is so loud it has blown out one of his eardrums. The soft hairs on his forearms are standing erect. He is so pale and so well lit, he h
imself looks plugged in. Far below, an enormous white shape rises and circles in the clear black water. The first shark that jumps up into the air is the size of a small car, the second more like a truck. Robert dives.

  *

  Death is a second puberty for the dead boys, and to be mortified is to mature: “You may notice your body is going through some changes,” and so on. Joachim stays up masturbating until he fades away. All that’s left are the dark shadows under his eyes, hanging in the air like a double Cheshire Cat’s smile.

  *

  Dread lights at dusk, the notebook lying on the floor. Twenty-four hours, more or less, after my last drink. In the pale green light, lying in bed: delirium tremens. It begins very rudely— without seizure or much warning in the form of fever or trembling, which were slight—when an enormous spider crawls across my chest very quickly and into my now screaming mouth. I crush it by constricting my throat; it is dry, like a little tumbleweed. After that thousands of tiny spiders begin to crawl across my face. I can feel and see them; they are biting me—I am shrieking. Their shadows race across the green walls of the bedroom. There is someone lying down beside me in the bed, a heavy, heavy shape. I dare not turn my head.

  *

  Note

  The section beginning “While digging at the edge of a little garden…” in Part II includes a retelling of a story from folklore that may be found recounted as “The Big Toe” in Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.