Those who were still awake began to gather around to watch, which Kit knew was also a regular part of these Mickifesten. The intensity of Humfried’s monologue picked up, as if he were aware of his audience and his obligations as an entertainer. By now Gottlob and Günther had pulled his trousers down and were attempting to insert the huge nozzle into his rectum, bickering over points of technique. Someone else was in the kitchen concocting an emetic from mustard and raw eggs.
Anyone expecting a chance to look into the mysteries of death and return would be disappointed tonight.
“Only the vomiting? You will not administer strychnine?”
“Strychnine is for French schoolchildren, not as good an antidote for chloral as chloral is for strychnine.”
“Noncommutative, so?”
“Asymmetric, at any rate.”
Günther gave Humfried a professional once-over. “I am afraid he will have to go to the hospital.”
“Let me do that,” Kit said, feeling less obliging than anxious for no reason he could think of, until about a block from the hospital, there, huge and in no one’s control, least of all his own, came Foley, running at him with something in his hand. “Traverse! Come here, goddamn you.” He might have been drunk, but Kit did not delude himself that it gave him any kind of an edge on Foley.
“A friend of yours,” said Gottlob, who was holding Humfried up from the other side.
“I owe him money. Any way we could lose him?”
“This part of town is my second home,” Gottlob began, when there was the sound, dishearteningly distinct, of a gunshot. “Verfluchte cowboy!” screamed Gottlob, and ran off.
The chloral-addled Humfried, by now able to walk, grabbed Kit by the arm and steered him quickly into the nearest hospital entrance. “Trust me,” he mumbled. “Achtung, Schwester! Here another dope-fiend is!”
Next thing Kit knew he was surrounded by orderlies and being bustled down a corridor.
“Wait a minute, folks, where’s that fellow I brought in?” But Humfried had vanished completely.
“Imaginary-companion syndrome, quite typical,” murmured an interne.
“But I’m the sober one here.”
“Of course you are, and here is a special souvenir we give to all visitors as a reward for being so sober,” dexterously jabbing him with a hypodermic. Kit dropped like a stone. And so it was off to the Klapsmühle.
Foley, in one of his canonical outfits, was seen leaving town the next morning, with what was described as a grumpy expression on his face.
KIT WOKE TO SEE looming over him the face of a Dr. Willi Dingkopf, framed by a haircut in violation of more than one law of physics, and a vivid necktie in fuchsia, heliotrope, and duck green, a gift from one of the patients, as the Doc presently explained in a voice hoarse from too much cigarette-smoking, “Hand-painted, as therapy, to express, though regrettably not control, certain recurring impulses of a homicidal nature.” Kit gazed at, or perhaps into, the tie’s ultra-modern design, in which its disturbed artist had failed to include much of anything encountered in the natural world—yet, who knew? maybe if you studied it long enough, familiar shapes might begin to emerge, some in fact what you might call, what was the word, entertaining—
“Hey! what are you— You just hit me with, with that stick?”
“An ancient technique, borrowed from the Zennists of Japan. Why were you staring so at my necktie?”
“Was I? I didn’t—”
“Hmm . . .” writing in a note-book, “and have there been any . . . voices? seeming to arise in the classical three-space but, if we perhaps would take one more, conceptually all-but-trivial . . . step? into a further, as you would say . . . dimension?”
“Voices, Doc? from another dimension?”
“Good! reasoning powers, you see? you’re getting saner already! You must not feel alone in this, Herr Traverse. No! You have merely undergone a small perturbation of the Co-conscious aggravated by chloral abuse, which, once out of your acute phase and among these wholesome surroundings, tends to pass quickly.”
“But I didn’t say I heard any voices. Did I?”
“Mm, some memory loss as well . . . and, and ‘Traverse,’ what sort of name . . . you are not also Hebraic, by any chance?”
“What? I don’t know. . . . Next time I talk with God, I’ll ask.”
“Ja—well, now and then one finds an Hebraic indication, accompanied by feelings of being not sufficiently Gentile, this is quite common, with corollary anxieties about being too Jewish . . .?”
“You sound anxious yourself, Doc.”
“Oh, more than anxious—alarmed, as I observe, strangely, you are not. By the millions now into your own country they are streaming—how naïve do Americans have to be, not to see the danger?”
“Jews are dangerous?”
“Jews are smart. The Jew Marx, driven by his unnatural smartness to strike at the social order . . . the Jew Freud, pretending to heal souls—it is my livelihood, of course, I take exception—the Jew Cantor, the Beast of Halle, who seeks to demolish the very foundations of mathematics, bringing these Göttingen people paranoid and screaming to my door, where naturally I am expected to deal with it—”
“Wait, excuse me, Herr Doktor,” somebody piped up the next time Dingkopf delivered this speech, which happened to be during a group-therapy session, “Cantor is a practicing Lutheran.”
“With a name like that? Please.”
“And far from ruination, what he may have led us to is a paradise, as Dr. Hilbert has famously described it.”
“Dr. . . . David Hilbert, you will note.”
“He’s not Jewish either.”
“How well informed everyone is today.”
The Kolonie proved to be a well-ventilated complex of glazed yellow brick buildings, solidly constructed on the principles of Invisibilism, a school of modern architecture which believed that the more “rationally” a structure was designed, the less visible would it appear, in extreme examples converging to its so-called Penultimate Term—the step just before deliverance into the Invisible, or as some preferred to say, “into its own meta-structure,” minimally attached to the physical world.
“Until one day one is left with only traces in the world, a few tangles of barbed wire defining the plan-view of something no longer quite able to be seen . . . perhaps certain odors as well, seeping in, late at night, from somewhere upwind, a wind which itself possesses now the same index of refraction as the departed Structure. . . .”
This was being explained earnestly to Kit by someone in a guard’s uniform, whom Kit, in his innocence, assumed was a guard. On the shoulder of the uniform was displayed a patch showing a stylized human brain with some sort of Teutonic ax-blade sunk halfway into it, which Kit took for Kolonie insignia. The weapon was black and silver, the brain a cheerful aniline magenta. The motto above read “So Gut Wie Neu,” or “Good As New.”
They were out on the “Dirigible Field,” a notional sort of plane surface where Klapsmühle activities included earth displacement, rock excavation, and surface dressing, under the supervision of a platoon of “engineers” with real-looking surveyors’ instruments and so forth, who did not appear to be inmates of the Kolonie, though around here one so seldom could tell.
There was great excitement in the Kolonie today, for at any moment, a real Dirigible was actually expected to come and land at the Dirigible Field! Most of the residents had never seen a Dirigible, but there were a few with no shyness about describing it to the others. “It will come to deliver us from this place, all are welcome, it is the express flight to Doofland, the ancestral home of the mental inmate, it will descend, a gigantic triumph of bohemian décor, luminescent in every color of the spectrum, and the Ship’s Band will be playing old favorites such as ‘O Tempora, O Mores,’ and ‘The Black Whale of Askalon,’ as we happily troop on board, into the streamlined gondola suspended exactly at the Point of Infinity, for the Dirigible’s secret Name is the Riemann Ellipsoid,” and so for
th.
A football, booted from very far away, now came sailing overhead, and some mistook it momentarily for the Dirigible, whose arrival, it was hoped, would not conflict with any of the football games that seemed to be in constant progress on the Dirigible Field all day long and particularly in the dark, which was actually the preferred condition, though it made for a different style of game.
“This ball has about as much bounce as the head of Jochanaan,” somebody cried out, a reference to a recent therapeutic excursion the inmates had made to Berlin to see a performance of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, from which Dr. Dingkopf had come away muttering about “a severe neuropathic crisis of spirit abroad in present-day Germany,” although the group themselves—not unreasonably, given Strauss’s own description of the work as a scherzo with a fatal conclusion—had kept breaking into insane laughter, which soon spread from the one-and-a-half-mark seats to the “normal” folks in the rest of the theatre. Since this trip, Kolonie attendants had been obliged to put up with the new catchphrase, whether on the football field or in the dining-hall (“What are we eating?” “Looks like the head of Jochanaan”), or to listen to the religious bickering of the Five Jews, which somehow was the only part of the opera that everyone, it seemed, had memorized, note for note, perhaps to annoy Dr. Dingkopf, who did begin to show the strain after a while, being reported wandering about the grounds at odd hours singing “Judeamus igitur, Judenes dum su-hu-mus . . .” in a distracted tenor.
“ICH BIN EIN BERLINER!”
“Excuse me?” The patient seemed anxious to speak with Kit.
“He will not harm you,” Dr. Dingkopf assured him as attendants adroitly steered the patient away. “He has come to believe that he is a certain well-known pastry of Berlin—similar to your own American, as you would say, Jelly-doughnut.”
“How long’s he been in here?”
Shrug. “A difficult case. The Jelly-doughnut being such a powerful metaphor for body and spirit, to find one’s way back to sanity merely through reason becomes quite problematic—so we must resort to Phenomenology, and accept the literal truth of his delusion—bringing him into Göttingen, to a certain Konditerei where he is all over powdered with Puderzucker and allowed to sit, or actually recline, up on a shelf ordinarily reserved for the pastries. When he starts in with his ‘Ich bin ein Berliner,’ most customers try only to correct his diction, as if he is from Berlin and has meant to say ‘Ich bin Berliner’—though sometimes he is actually purchased—‘Did you want a bag for that, madame?’ ‘Oh, no, no thank you, I’ll eat it right here if I may.’”
“Well—if that doesn’t bring him back to reality . . .”
“Ach, but no, he only remains inert, even when they attempt to . . . bite into—”
SEVERAL HOURS LATER, Kit became aware of a huge, soft, indistinct mass in the gloom of the dormitory, giving off the unmistakable scent of freshly-baked pastry.
“Shh—don’t react, please.”
“It’s O.K., I was only lying here, observing the wallpaper in the dark.”
“Oh? Really? Is it—what is it saying to you?”
“It’s already led me to certain unexpected conclusions about the automorphic functions. How’s everything with you?”
“Well first, allow me to point out—I’m not really a jelly doughnut.”
“Got to say, the resemblance is, well, amazing, and you can talk, and everything?”
“It was the only way one knew of to contact you. Your friend Miss Halfcourt sent me.”
Kit had a look. Another victim of enchantment—all Yashmeen had had to do, he reckoned, was give this customer a kiss.
“It’s like invisibility,” the apparition continued, “only different? Most people can’t admit they see me. So in effect they don’t see me. And then the cannibalism issue of course.”
“The . . . I don’t exactly . . .”
“Well. Puts them in a bind, doesn’t it. I mean, if I’m human, and they’re considering me for breakfast, that makes them cannibals—but if I really am a jelly doughnut, then, being cannibals, they all have to be jelly doughnuts as well, don’t you see?” He began to laugh merrily.
Kit glanced up at the radium dial of the clock on the wall. It was half past three in the morning.
“Let’s be on our way, shall we?” The oversize pastry item led him down a corridor, around a few corners, out through an equipment room into the moonlight. “I’d like to escort you all the way out, but it’ll be breakfast time soon and . . . well, you understand.”
They found Kit sleeping by the fence. Dr. Dingkopf was waiting back at his office with a great bundle of release papers to be signed. “Your British friends have interceded on your behalf. What does my own professional judgment matter, twenty years of clinical experience, next to this sinister tribal conspiracy . . . even in England . . . not the pure-blooded nation it once was . . . Halfcourt . . . Halfcourt? what kind of a name is that?”
YASHMEEN CAUGHT UP with him at the café they’d been in the other evening. He hadn’t exactly got back to sleep nor seen much point in shaving. “Come. Let us walk Der Wall.” It was a peaceful morning, a breeze ruffled the leaves of the lindens.
“How much do you know of Shambhala, Kit?”
He turned his head, peered at her out of one eye. Wasn’t everybody being a little too damned businesslike this morning? “May have heard the place mentioned once or twice.”
“An ancient metropolis of the spiritual, some say inhabited by the living, others say empty, in ruins, buried someplace beneath the desert sands of Inner Asia. And of course there are always those who’ll tell you that the true Shambhala lies within.”
“And? Which is it?”
She frowned quickly. “I suppose it is a real place on the globe, in the sense that the Point at Infinity is a place ‘on’ the Riemann sphere. The money invested to date by the Powers in expeditions to ‘discover’ the place is certainly real enough. The political forces being deployed . . . political and military as well . . .”
“But not specially your mug of beer.”
“My—” She allowed a dotted quarter-rest. “Colonel Halfcourt is involved. If I’m deciphering this properly.”
“In trouble?”
“No one is sure.” Not for the first time, he had the dispirited feeling that she was expecting something from him he couldn’t even name, let alone provide. “There are a hundred reasons why I should be out there with him. . . .”
“And just one that you shouldn’t.” Was he supposed to try and guess?
They stared at each other over what might have been Ætheric distances. “At your level of intuition, Kit,” with a troubled smile at last, “we might be here for hours.”
“Who could object to hours spent in charming company?”
“I think that’s supposed to be ‘in such charming company.’”
“Whoops.”
“We spoke last time of employment with the T.W.I.T.”
“That’s who got me out of the Klapsmühle?”
“Lionel Swome. You’re about to meet him. What were you doing in there?”
“Hiding, I guess.” He told her about Foley’s night visit.
“It sounds like you dreamed it.”
“Makes no difference. The message he was delivering was the thing. Sooner I’m out of here the better.”
“Let’s stroll up the Hainberg for a bit, shall we.” Both of them scanning ahead and behind, she brought him presently to a restaurant on a hillside, with a view of the walls of the tranquil town, where sat T.W.I.T. travel coördinator Lionel Swome at a table under an umbrella for the afternoon light, with a bottle of Rheinpfalz from last autumn, and two glasses. After introductions, Yashmeen flourished her parasol and was off down the mountain again.
“Right,” said Swome. “You’re about to do a bunk, I’m told.”
“Amazing! I only just decided a couple minutes ago, on the way up here—but you people with your mental telepathy, I keep forgetting.”
&nb
sp; “And you’ve no restrictions as to where you go.”
Kit shrugged. “Further away the better, doesn’t matter to me—why? does it to you?”
“Inner Asia?”
“Just fine.”
Swome studied his wineglass, not drinking. “There are those who prefer other Deidesheimers—Herrgottsackers and such—to those of the Hofstück. But year for year, if one takes the time to—”
“Mr. Swome.”
A shrug, as if having come to an understanding with himself. “Very well—Miss Halfcourt being in a comparable situation, you two are about to solve your mutual difficulties—by eloping together to Switzerland.”
Kit tugged an invisible hatbrim down over his face. “Sure. Everybody’s going to believe that.”
“Maybe nobody you know. But those we seek to deceive just might, especially when we provide abundant evidence—travel permits, hotel reservations, bank correspondence, and so on. Up to a point you and the young lady will carry on in as obviously newlywed a manner as possible—Mr. Traverse? you are with me here? good—and the next moment, presto—you shall each have disappeared in a different direction, in your own case, eastward.”
Kit waited for him to go on. Finally, “And . . .?”
“The ex-bride-to-be? Hmm, no idea. Someone else’s desk really. Meanwhile, as you’ll be out there, perhaps there is one small errand you wouldn’t mind having a bash at for us.”
“And . . . that would be to do with um, what’s its name again . . .”
“Shambhala. Yes, in a way.”
“I’m not a Theosophist or even much of a world traveler, I hope somebody’s mentioned that to you. Maybe you’ll want at least a little field experience here.”
“Your chief virtue, precisely. No one out there knows a blessed thing about you. We’ve any number of old Inner Asia hands on the lurk at the usual oases and bazaars, but everyone there knows everyone else’s story, it’s all a stalemate, best thing now is to inject some element of the unknown.”
“Me.”
“And you come well recommended by Sidney Reilly.”
“Um . . .”
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