The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

by Angela Carter

  However, one day some twenty years previously, Dr Hoffman, the already enormously distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of P., dismissed with a few kind words and a handsome present the valet who looked after him; made a bonfire of his notebooks; packed in a valise a toothbrush, a change of shirts and underwear and the choicest of his father’s library of cabbalistic books; took a taxi to the central railway station; bought a single ticket to the mountain resort of L.; went to the correct platform, where he purchased a pack of imported cigarettes and a net of tangerines from the kiosk; was observed by a porter to peel and consume a fruit; was seen by another porter to enter the gentlemen’s lavatory; and then vanished. He vanished so expeditiously there were even obituaries in the press.

  In the years preceding the Reality War, an itinerant showman who gave his name as Mendoza made a small living touring country fairs and carnivals with a small theatre. This theatre did not have any actors; it was a peep-show cum cinematograph but it offered moving views in three dimensions and those who visited it were impressed by the lifelikeness of what they saw. Mendoza prospered. In time he came to the Whitsun Fair in the capital with his theatre, but by this time his art had progressed and now he offered a trip in a time machine. Customers were invited to take off their clothes and don all manner of period costumes provided for them by the impresario. When they were suitably garbed, the lights dimmed and Mendoza projected upon a screen various old newsreels and an occasional early silent comedy. These films had, as it were, slots in them in which the members of the audience could insert themselves and so become part of the shadow show they witnessed. I spoke with a man who, as a child, had been in this fashion an eye-witness of the assassination at Sarajevo. He said it had been raining heavily at the time and everybody moved with the spasmodic jerkiness of clockwork figures. This showman, Mendoza, must have been one of Dr Hoffman’s first disciples or even perhaps an early missionary. Hoffman’s undergraduate class list included a fellow student named Mendoza, said to be psychologically unstable, who did not complete his course of study. But one day a drunken crowd burned down his booth and Mendoza was burned with it, so badly that he died a few days later in some anonymous charity ward, attended by Sisters of Mercy. What linked him unambiguously to Hoffman had been his repeated mutterings: ‘Beware the Hoffman effect!’ On his board-hard death bed, under a casque of lint, he muttered away, an elderly nun remembered. But now Mendoza was irretrievably dead and the Minister wondered if he were not a red herring.

  The Minister had built up a hypothetical model of the invisible Dr Hoffman much as Dr Drosselmeier had built up a model of the unreality atom. From the scientist’s academic record, we could see there was scarcely a branch of human knowledge with which he had not familiarized himself. We knew of his taste for the occult. We knew his height, his size in hats, shoes and gloves; his favourite brands of cigars, eau de cologne and tea. The Minister’s model was that of a crazed genius, a megalomaniac who wanted absolute power and would go to extreme lengths to grasp it. He thought Hoffman was satanic and yet I knew my master too well not to realize he was tainted with a little envy for the very power the Doctor abused with such insouciance, the power to subvert the world. This did not lessen my admiration for the Minister. On the contrary, I was so lacking in ambition myself that the spectacle of his, which ravaged him, impressed me enormously. He was like a Faust who cannot find a friendly devil. Or, if he had done so, he would not have been able to believe in him.

  The Minister had all the Faustian desires but, since he had rejected the transcendental, he had clipped his own wings. In my meditative days, I used to think that the Faust legend was a warped version of the myth of Prometheus, who defied the wrath of god to gain the prize of fire and was punished for it. I could not see what there might be wrong with knowledge in itself, no matter what the price. In spite of my post, I had taken no sides in the struggle between Dr Hoffman and the Minister. At times I even speculated that Hoffman was altogether Prometheus and no Faust at all, for Faust had been content with conjuring tricks while the manifestations around us sometimes looked as though they were formed of authentic flame. But I kept these thoughts to myself. Nevertheless, you must realize the adversaries were of equal stature. The Minister possessed supernatural strength of mind to have stood out so long and it was his phenomenal intransigence alone which upheld the city.

  Indeed, he had become the city. He had become the invisible walls of the city; in himself, he represented the grand totality of the city’s resistance. His movements began to take on a megalithic grandeur. He said continually: ‘No surrender!’ and I could not deny his dignity. I even revered it. But, for myself, I had no axe to grind.

  The siege went into its third year. Supplies of food were almost at an end. An epidemic of cholera decimated the eastern suburbs and thirty cases of typhus had been reported that week. Even the discipline of the Determination Police was fraying and now and then one of them would slip into the Minister’s office to tell tales on a colleague. My landlady vanished. Somehow, without anybody knowing, she was dead somewhere, so now I was alone in my house. Every day, the police suppressed riots with tear gas and machine gun fire. And it was blinding, humid, foetid summer, a summer that smelled of shit, blood and roses, for there had never been such roses as those that bloomed that summer. They clambered everywhere and dripped as if perspiring the heaviest, most intoxicating perfume, which seemed to make the very masonry drunk. The senses fused; sometimes these roses emitted low but intolerably piercing pentatonic melodies which were the sound of their deep crimson colour and yet we heard them inside our nostrils. The citronade of the pale morning sun shimmered like a multitude of violins and I tasted unripe apples in the rare, green, midnight rain.

  It was the day before my twenty-fourth birthday. In the afternoon, the Cathedral expired in a blaze of melodious fireworks.

  It was our greatest national monument. It had been of immense size and architecturally sublimely chaste. Until then, its severe, classical revival façade had grandly ignored all the Doctor’s whimsical attempts to transform it into a funfair or a mausoleum for ships’ figureheads or a slaughterhouse so he finally detonated it with pyrotechnics. The Minister and I watched the illuminations from our window. The dome rose up and dissolved against the clear blue sky of the middle of the afternoon like a fiery parasol but, while I was faintly regretting that the spectacle had not taken place at night when I should have enjoyed it better, I saw that the Minister was weeping. Berlioz crashed about us; we stood in the heart of a fantastic symphony, awaiting the climacteric, death, which would come in the form of a fatal circus.

  For my supper, I ate a salad of dandelions I picked from the wall of my house, which had begun to sprout flowers. I brewed myself a pot from my four-weekly ounce ration of coffee substitute and, I remember, read a little. I read a few pages of The Rape of the Lock. When it was time to sleep, she came to me. For the first time, I smiled at her; she made no response. I slept; and early the next morning, I awoke and yet I knew I was still sleeping for my bed was now, in fact, an island in the middle of an immense lake.

  Night was approaching although I knew it was nearly dawn for outside – outside, that is, of the dream – a cock continued to crow. However, within my dream, the shadows of evening took the colours from the shifting waters round me and a small wind rustled the quills of the pine trees, for my island was covered with pines. Nothing moved except this little, lonely wind. I waited, for the dream imperiously demanded that I wait and I seemed to wait endlessly. I do not think I have ever felt so alone, as if I were the last living thing left in the world and this island and this lake were all that was left of the world.

  Presently I saw the object of my vigil. A creature was approaching over the water but it did not assuage my loneliness for though I could see it was alive, it did not seem to be alive in the same sense that I was alive and I shuddered with dread. I know I must have stood in an attitude of awed listening, as if to hear the scratching of the cla
ws of the unknown on the outside rind of the world. The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown; I was afraid. I had been afraid when I was a child, when I would lie awake at night and hear my mother panting and grunting like a tiger in the darkness beyond the curtain and I thought she had changed into a beast. Now I was even more afraid than I had been then.

  As it drew near, I saw it was a swan. It was a black swan. I cannot tell you how ugly it was; nor yet how marvellous it was. Its vapid eyes were set too close together on its head and expressed a kind of mindless evil that was quite without glamour, though evil is usually attractive, because evil is defiant. Its elongated neck had none of the grace traditionally ascribed to the necks of swans but lolled foolishly, now this way, now that, like a length of hose. And the beak, which was the clear, pinkish scarlet of scentless roses, striped with a single band of white, was flat, broad and spatulate, fit only for grubbing worms from mud. It swam remorselessly and terribly towards me but, when only a few yards of shifting water lay between us, it paused to unfurl its enormous wings as if it were opening a heraldic umbrella.

  Never have I seen such blackness, such a soft, feathered, absolute black, a black as intense as the negation of light, black the colour of the extinction of consciousness. The swan flexed its neck like a snake about to strike, opened its beak and began to sing so that I knew it was about to die and I knew, too, she was a swan and also a woman for there issued from her throat a thrilling, erotic contralto. Her song was a savage, wordless lament with the dramatic cadences of flamenco in a scale the notes of which were unfamiliar to me yet seemed those of an ultimate Platonic mode, an elemental music. The shadows deepened yet one last ray of the invisible sun drew a gleam from a golden collar around her throbbing throat and on the collar was engraved the single word: ALBERTINA. The dream broke like a storm and I woke.

  The room was full of muffled sunlight. The cock had ceased to crow. But I did not wake properly even though my eyes were open; the dream left my mind full of cobwebs and I scarcely saw the morning though I went, as usual, to the office and found the Minister going through his mail. He was studying a letter which had arrived in an envelope bearing the postmark of one of the solid suburbs in the north of the city. He began to laugh softly.

  ‘Dr Hoffman’s special agent would like me to take him to lunch today,’ he said and handed me the letter. ‘Test this immediately.’

  It went through innumerable computers. It went through Reality Testing Laboratories A and B and we photocopied it before it went through Laboratory C. This was fortunate for it was authentic.

  I was to go with the Minister to the rendezvous. My task was simple. I was to record every word that passed between the Minister and the agent on a very small tape recorder concealed in my pocket. He sent me home to change my suit and put on a tie. I must say, most of all, I was looking forward to a good meal for such things were hard to come by nowadays – yet I could see what the Minister could not, that Dr Hoffman would not have sent him the invitation had he not believed we were on our knees.

  The restaurant was luxuriously discreet. All its staff had unimpeachable reality ratings, even the plongeurs. We waited for our contact in a dim, confidential bar too comfortably redolent of money to be affected by the tempest of fantasy we could not glimpse outside because the windows were so heavily curtained. Sipping his gin and tonic, the Minister alternately consulted his watch and tapped his foot; I was interested to see he was unable to perform these actions simultaneously, perhaps because he was so single-minded. He emanated tension. A muscle twitched in his cheek. He lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the one he had just put out. We knew who it was the instant our contact came in because the lights immediately fused.

  A dozen tiny fireflies clicked into life at the nozzle of a dozen cigarette lighters but I could make out only the vaguest outlines of Dr Hoffman’s emissary until the waiters brought in a number of branched candlesticks so that he was illuminated like the icon he resembled. A breeze seemed to play about him, tossing the small flames hither and thither, keeping constantly aflutter the innumerable ruffles on his lace shirt and casting a multitude of shadows over his face. Presumably he was either of Mongolian extraction or else he numbered among his ancestors, as I did, certain of the forgotten Indians who still linger miserably in the more impenetrable mountains or skulk along the waterways, for his skin was like polished brass, at once greenish and yellowish, his eyelids were vestigial and his cheekbones unusually high. Luxuriantly glossy hair so black it was purplish in colour made of his head almost too heavy a helmet to be supported by the slender column of his neck and his blunt-lipped, sensual mouth was also purplish in colour, as if he had been eating berries. Around his eyes, which were as hieratically brown and uncommunicative as those the Ancient Egyptians painted on their sarcophagi, were thick bands of solid gold cosmetic and the nails on his long hands were enamelled dark crimson, to match the nails on his similarly elegant feet, which were fully exposed by sandals consisting of mere gold thongs. He wore flared trousers of purple suede and used several ropes of pearls for a belt around his waist. All his gestures were instinct with a self-conscious but extraordinary reptilian liquidity; when we rose to go to eat, I saw that he seemed to move in soft coils. I think he was the most beautiful human being I have ever seen – considered, that is, solely as an object, a construction of flesh, skin, bone and fabric, and yet, for all his ambiguous sophistication, indeed, perhaps in its very nature, he hinted at a savagery which had been cunningly tailored to suit the drawing room, though it had been in no way diminished. He was a manicured leopard patently in complicity with chaos. Secure in the armour of his ambivalence, he patronized us. His manner was one of wry, supercilious reserve. He was no common agent. He behaved like an ambassador of an exceedingly powerful principality visiting a small but diplomatically by no means insignificant state. He treated us with the regal condescension of a first lady and the Minister and I found ourselves behaving like boorish provincials who dropped our forks, slopped our soup, knocked over our wine glasses and spilled mayonnaise on our ties while he watched us with faint amusement and barely discernible contempt.

  In a gracious attempt to put us at our ease, he chatted desultorily about baroque music in a low, dark voice which had a singular, furry quality. But the Minister refused to talk small talk. He spooned his consommé distastefully, grunting now and then, his cold eyes fixed suspiciously on the luring siren before us who ate with an unfamiliar but graceful series of gestures of the hands, like those of Javanese dancers. I drank my soup and watched them. It was like the dialogue between a tentacular flower and a stone. A waiter took away the plates and brought us sole véronique. You would not have believed we were at war. The young man speared a grape with his fork. He folded up Vivaldi and his lesser-known contemporaries and put them away. As we dismembered our fish, the following conversation took place. I found the tape in a lead coffin in the ruins of the Bureau of Determination many years later, and so am able to transcribe it verbatim.

  AMBASSADOR: Dr Hoffman is coming to storm the ideological castle of which at present, my dear Minister, you are the king.

  (This was a minor preliminary sortie. He fluttered his darkened lashes at us and tinkled with diminutive laughter.)

  MINISTER: He has made his intentions in that direction abundantly clear. As far as we can tell, he opened hostilities perhaps three years ago and by now there are no directions left in the city while the clocks no longer answer to the time.

  AMBASSADOR: Yes, indeed! The Doctor has liberated the streets from the tyranny of directions and now they can go anywhere they please. He also set the timepieces free so that now they are authentically pieces of time and can tell everybody whatever time they like. I am especially happy for the clocks. They used to have such innocent faces. They had the water-melon munching, opaquely-eyed visages of slaves and the Doctor has already proved himself a horological Abraham Lincoln. Now he will liberat
e you all, Minister.

  MINISTER: But ought the roads to rule the city?

  AMBASSADOR: Don’t you think we should give them a crack at the whip now and then? Poor things, forever oriented by the insensitive feet of those who trample them. Time and space have their own properties, Minister, and these, perhaps, have more value than you customarily allow them. Time and space are the very guts of nature and so, naturally, they undulate in the manner of intestines.

  MINISTER: I see you make a habit of analogies.