Machines in the Head

by Anna Kavan

  What has the rat got to do with it? Must we keep thinking about rats?

  What else should we think about?

  the end of every project comes down to the rat.

  Certainly it must have found its way under the white serge of that mourner and eaten away the heart if ever there was one . . .

  don’t look now, but she’s there again, ghastlier than ever, and the dogs are just bags of bones.

  There she goes up the slope to the cemetery with her white serge costume, skeleton lank, and the violet powder on her crêpey cheeks, and the terrible gash of lipstick like heart disease.

  On leashes she holds the two dogs which, but for these sustaining thongs, seem likely to fall down, brittle legs too weak to carry even such an insignificant weight of emaciation . . .

  they’re thinner every day, I swear they are . . . and those sores . . . it oughtn’t to be allowed.

  At the gate she pauses. Her long black Lillie Langtry lady-like shoes fastidiously squelch the mire churned up by bourgeois foot gear. Claw within lisle glove, one hand tentatively scrabbles the iron work in a fashion suggestive of exploratory familiarity with the interiors of dustbins.

  But just imagine white serge in November . . . imagine white serge at any time . . . must be about a 1900 model . . . people oughtn’t to be allowed to make such scarecrows of themselves . . . ought to have more consideration for others . . . disgusting really . . . and those dogs . . . they ought to be put out of their misery . . . why doesn’t somebody do something about it?

  She’s reached her destination, she’s got her hand on the knob, everything seems to be working to a conclusion. But there’s that last-minute hitch. Something’s missing after all. What is it that’s not there? What’s lacking underneath the white serge?

  Most unfortunate, profoundly desolating, but really, you know, nothing can be done without it, it’s absolutely essential to produce it before any action can be taken . . . you say the rat? . . . my dear madame, I’m extremely sorry, inconsolable, in fact . . . but there’s simply no provision made . . . it’s not as if one could do anything oneself either . . .

  With lisle fingers she smooths a droplet from the end of her nose, examines briefly the damp smear, puts into stiff motion the stilt-like mechanism of her lower limbs. Feebly submissive, the dogs totter alongside.

  Don’t look now, but she’s going . . . the dogs can hardly drag one foot after the other . . . it’s a disgrace . . . cruelty to dumb animals . . . why does she always come as far as this gate and then go away . . . staring in like that . . . ghoulish I call it . . .

  don’t look now, but she’s got the scrubbiest little bit of fur you ever saw around her neck . . . looks just like a dead rat . . . don’t look now . . . don’t look . . .

  THE OLD ADDRESS

  THE DAY SISTER COMES in while I’m packing to leave. She’s about ten feet tall and, as if to disguise the fact, usually adopts a slouch and keeps her hands in her pockets under the starched apron. Now, however, she has a big envelope marked Patient’s Property in one hand, which she holds out to me.

  ‘You won’t need this, but we have to return it to you now you’re being discharged.’

  I take it. How very odd. I get a sensation like dreaming as I feel through the paper the familiar barrel-shape of the syringe I haven’t felt for so long.

  ‘It’s no use anyhow’, I say to her, ‘without something to put in it.’ This doesn’t sound quite the right thing, so I add, ‘I may as well leave it here’, and drop it nonchalantly into the wastepaper basket.

  She stares at me so hard that I wonder what’s in her mind. Finally she shrugs her shoulders and slouches out, omitting to say goodbye.

  I wait until I’m sure she’s not coming back, then retrieve the envelope and put it into my bag. I’ve no particular object in doing so; the action seems pretty well automatic. I sit down to wait for someone to come and fetch me, but I’m too restless to keep still, so I put my coat on and walk out of the ward and along a passage, past a number of people, none of whom takes the slightest notice of me.

  Besides the syringe, the usual collection of things, including money, is in my bag. If anybody asks questions, I’m on my way to buy farewell presents for the nurses. Commendable, surely?

  No questions are asked. The porter shoves the revolving door. I go down the steps of the main entrance and on to the pavement.

  I’m outside again. Free. Also, of course, I’m still guilty and always shall be. I don’t feel anything much, though, except that it’s strange to be out here on my own. After a few steps strange equates with disturbing. This isn’t the world I know. I look all around, at the crowds, the skyscrapers, the mass of traffic. It all looks delirious, ominous, mad.

  There’s an absolute mob surging along the pavement; you can’t move without bumping into someone. I search in vain for a human face. Only hordes of masks, dummies, zombies go charging past, blindly, heads down. Stern condemnatory faces of magistrates glare at me from their pedestals at street corners. Cold enemy eyes, arrow eyes, pierce me with poison-tipped suspicion, as if they know where I’ve come from.

  Terrible eyes. Terrible noise. Terrible traffic.

  The sky is full of unnatural light, which is really a darkish murk and makes everything look sinister, a black conspiracy hanging up there in the air. Something frightful seems to be happening or going to happen.

  The traffic roars, bellows, hurls itself in a torrential surge as into battle – cars thresh about like primeval monsters. Some have grins of diabolical joy on their malevolent rudimentary faces, gloating over prospective victims. They’re anticipating the moment when their murderous deadweight of hard heavy metal will tear into soft, vulnerable, defenceless flesh, mashing it into a pulp, which, thinly spread on the roadway, creates a treacherous slippery surface where other cars skid in circles, their wheels entangled in sausage-strings of entrails bursting out of the mess.

  Suddenly I notice that one car has selected me as its prey and is making straight for me through all the chaos. Come on then! Knock me down, run over me, cut off my existence. I don’t want it – don’t like it. I never did. The size of a locomotive, the hideous great mechanical dinosaur bears down upon me. Already the metal assassin towers over my head.

  And now the dingy mass hits me with the full force of its horrid inhuman horsepower, a ton or so of old iron to finish me off. I’m demolished, done for, down on the pavement which is already black with my blood. Lying there, mangled, splintered, a smashed matchbox, all at once I find I’m transformed into an inexhaustible fountain, spouting blood like a whale.

  Huge black clots, gouts, of whale blood shoot high in the air, then splash down in the mounting flood, soaking the nearest pedestrians. Everybody is slipping and slithering, wading in blood. It’s over their ankles. Now it’s up to their knees. All along the street, children start screaming, licking blood off their chins, tasting it on their tongues just before they drown.

  The grown-ups can’t save them; they’re drowning, too. Fine! Splendid! Let them all drown, the bastards; they’ve all done their best to destroy me. I hate them all. There’s no end to my blood supply. It’s been turned on full at the main, at high pressure; nobody knows how to turn it off. Everywhere people are coughing and choking, their lungs are filling with my unbreathable blood, and it’s poison, a deadly poison, to them.

  Wonderful! At last I’m being revenged on those who have persecuted me all my life. I’ve always loathed the horrible hostile creatures pressing around me in a suffocating mass, trying to get me down, to trample on me. Down with them now! Now it’s their turn to suffocate. I laugh in their faces, smeared and streaked like Red Indians with my blood. And all the time my broken thorax goes on pouring out blood.

  They’re out of their depth now. They try to swim. But their clothes are too heavy, already saturated by the thick, sticky, steaming tide. Inevitably, they are dragged under, writhing, shouting and struggling. Wasting their strength in idiotic contortions, they’re all si
nking and drowning already. I lash out wildly at the few survivors, hit them as hard as I can, bash them on the head, forcing them down into the sea of blood as if they were so many eels. Down, wantons, down!

  Suddenly the show’s over. Sudden lightning strikes overhead. A forked tree of blinding brilliance flares up the sky, setting fire to it as it goes. In a flash, the whole sky is a sheet of flame, consumed, gone up in smoke. Nothing is left where the sky used to be except an expanse of grimy canvas like the walls of a tent. No wonder the light’s unnatural and things look strange, when the city, and most likely the whole world, is imprisoned under this gigantic tent, cut off from the sun, moon and stars.

  Why did I ever imagine that I was free? The truth is I couldn’t be more thoroughly trapped. Those vast walls enclosing me in an unbroken circle have now assumed a more spectral aspect and look more like mist. But this doesn’t make them any less impenetrable, impass able. Not at all. Only too well I know that there’s no way through them, that I shall never escape.

  The thought of being shut in for ever drives me out of my senses, so that I try to bash down walls with my bare hands, tear at bricks with my nails, pick the mortar out. It’s too ghastly. I’m not the sort of person who can live without seeing the sky. On the contrary, I have to look at it many times a day; I’m dying to be a part of it like the stars themselves. A cold finger of claustrophobia touches me icily. I can’t be imprisoned like this. Somehow or other I must get out.

  Suddenly on the edge of panic, I look around desperately for help. But, of course, I’m alone, as I always am. The pavements are deserted; there isn’t a soul in sight. Once again I’ve been betrayed and abandoned; by the whole human race this time. Only the traffic continues to hurtle past, cascades of cars racing along the street in a ceaseless metallic flood.

  Above the din of their engines, louder crashes erupt all around. Avalanches of deafening noise explode in my ears like bombs. In all the thunderous booming roar I can distinguish the sobs of heartbroken children, the shrieks of tortured victims and addicts deprived of drugs, sadistic laughter, moronic cries, the moans of unsuccessful suicides – the whole catastrophe of this inhuman city, where the wolf-howl of ambulances and police cars rises perpetually from dark gullies between the enormous buildings.

  Why am I locked in this nightmare of violence, isolation and cruelty? Since the universe only exists in my mind, I must have created the place, loathsome, foul as it is. I live alone in my mind, and alone I’m being crushed to suffocation, immured by the walls I have made. It’s unbearable. I can’t possibly live in this terrible, hideous, revolting creation of mine.

  I can’t die in it either, apparently. Demented, in utter frenzy, I rush madly up and down, hurl myself like a maniac into the traffic, bang my head with all my force against walls. Nothing changes. It makes no difference. The horror goes on just the same. It was enough that the world seemed to me vile and hateful for it to be so. And so it will remain, until I see it in a more favourable light – which means never.

  So there’s to be no end to my incarceration in this abominable, disgusting world . . . My thoughts go round in circles. Mad with despair, I don’t know what I’m doing, I can’t remember or think any more. The terror of life imprisonment stupefies me; I feel it inside me like an intolerable pain. I only know that I must escape from this hell of hallucination and horror. I can’t endure my atrocious prison a moment longer.

  There’s only one way of escape that I’ve ever discovered, and needless to say I haven’t forgotten that.

  So now I wave my arm frantically at a passing taxi, fall inside and tell the man to drive to the old address.

  A VISIT

  ONE HOT NIGHT a leopard came into my room and lay down on the bed beside me. I was half asleep and did not realize at first that it was a leopard. I seemed to be dreaming the sound of some large, soft-footed creature padding quietly through the house, the doors of which were wide open because of the intense heat. It was almost too dark to see the lithe, muscular shape coming into my room, treading softly on velvet paws, coming straight to the bed without hesitation, as if perfectly familiar with its position. A light spring, then warm breath on my arm, on my neck and shoulder, as the visitor sniffed me before lying down. It was not until later, when moonlight entering through the window revealed an abstract spotted design, that I recognized the form of an unusually large, handsome leopard stretched out beside me.

  His breathing was deep although almost inaudible; he seemed to be sound asleep. I watched the regular contractions and expansions of the deep chest, admired the elegant relaxed body and supple limbs and was confirmed in my conviction that the leopard is the most beautiful of all wild animals. In this particular specimen I noticed something singularly human about the formation of the skull, which was domed rather than flattened, as is generally the case with the big cats, suggesting the possibility of superior brain development inside. While I observed him, I was all the time breathing his natural odour, a wild primeval smell of sunshine, freedom, moon and crushed leaves, combined with the cool freshness of the spotted hide, still damp with the midnight moisture of jungle plants. I found this non-human scent, surrounding him like an aura of strangeness, peculiarly attractive and stimulating.

  My bed, like the walls of the house, was made of palm leaf matting stretched over stout bamboos, smooth and cool to the touch, even in the great heat. It was not so much a bed as a room within a room, an open staging about twelve feet square, so there was ample space for the leopard as well as myself. I slept better that night than I had since the hot weather started, and he, too, seemed to sleep peacefully at my side. The close proximity of this powerful body of another species gave me a pleasant sensation I am at a loss to name.

  When I awoke in the faint light of dawn, with the parrots screeching outside, he had already got up and left the room. Looking out, I saw him standing, statuesque, in front of the house on the small strip of ground I keep cleared between it and the jungle. I thought he was contemplating departure, but I dressed and went out, and he was still there, inspecting the fringe of the dense vegetation in which huge heavy hornbills were noisily flapping about.

  I called him and fed him with some meat I had in the house. I hoped he would speak, tell me why he had come and what he wanted of me. But although he looked at me thoughtfully with his large lustrous eyes, seeming to understand what I said, he did not answer but remained silent all day. I must emphasize that there was no hint of obstinacy or hostility in his silence, and I did not resent it. On the contrary, I respected him for his reserve; and, as the silence continued unbroken, I gave up expecting to hear his voice. I was glad of the pretext for using mine and went on talking to him. He always appeared to listen and understand me.

  The leopard was absent during much of the day. I assumed that he went hunting for his natural food; but he usually came back at intervals and seldom seemed to be far away. It was difficult to see him among the trees, even when he was quite close, the pattern of his protective spots blended so perfectly with the pattern of sunspots through savage branches. Only by staring with concentrated attention could I distinguish him from his background; he would be crouching there in a deep-shaded glade or lying extended with extraordinary grace along a limb of one of the giant kowikawas, whose branch structure supports less robust trees as well as countless creepers and smaller growths. The odd thing was that, as soon as I’d seen him, he invariably turned his head as if conscious that I was watching. Once I saw him much further off, on the beach, which is only just visible from my house. He was standing darkly outlined against the water, gazing out to sea; but even at this distance, his head turned in my direction, although I couldn’t possibly have been in his range of vision. Sometimes he would suddenly come indoors and silently go all through the house at a quick trot, unexpectedly entering one room after another, before he left again with the same mysterious abruptness. At other times he would lie just inside or outside with his head resting on the threshold, motionless except for
his watchful moving eyes and the twitching of his sensitive nostrils in response to stimuli which my less acute senses could not perceive.

  His movements were always silent, graceful, dignified, sure, and his large, dark eyes never failed to acknowledge me whenever we met in our daily comings and goings.

  I was delighted with my visitor, whose silence did not conceal his awareness of me. If I walked through the jungle to visit someone or to buy food from the neighbouring village, he would appear from nowhere and walk beside me but always stopped before a house was in sight, never allowing himself to be seen. Every night, of course, he slept on the bed at my side. As the weeks passed he seemed to be spending more time with me during the day, sitting or lying near me while I was working, now and then coming close to gaze attentively at what I was doing.

  Then, without warning, he suddenly left me. This was how it happened. The rainy season had come, bringing cooler weather; there was a chill in the early-morning air when he returned to my room as I finished dressing and leaned against me for a moment. He had hardly ever touched me in daylight, certainly never in that deliberate fashion. I took it to mean that he wished me to do something for him and asked what it was. Silently he led the way out of the house, pausing to look back every few steps to see whether I was coming, and into the jungle. The stormy sky was heavily clouded; it was almost dark under the trees, from which great drops of last night’s rain splashed coldly on my neck and bare arms. As he evidently wanted me to accompany him further, I said I would go back for a coat.

  However, he seemed to be too impatient to wait, lunging forward with long, loping strides, his shoulders thrusting like steel pistons under the velvet coat, while I reluctantly followed. Torrential rain began streaming down; in five minutes the ground was a bog into which my feet sank at each step. By now I was shivering, soaked to the skin, so I stopped and told him I couldn’t go on any further. He turned his head and for a long moment his limpid eyes looked at me fixedly with an expression I could not read. Then the beautiful head turned away, the muscles slid and bunched beneath patterned fur, as he launched himself in a tremendous leap through the shining curtain of raindrops, and was instantly hidden from sight. I walked home as fast as I could and changed into dry clothes. I did not expect to see him again before evening, but he did not come back at all.