But I had always possessed higher hopes for my life, hopes that were becoming more and more vague with each passing day. I have to resign my position at the factory. These were the words that raced through my mind as I tried to gain a few hours of rest before returning to my job. I had no idea what such a step might mean, since I had no other prospects for earning a living, and I had no money saved that would enable me to keep my room in the apartment building where I lived. In addition, the medications I required, that almost everyone on this side of the border requires to make their existence at all tolerable, were prescribed by doctors who were all employed by the Quine Organization and filled by pharmacists who also operated only at the sufferance of this company. All of that notwithstanding, I still felt that I had no choice but to resign my position at the factory.
At the end of the hallway outside my apartment there was a tiny niche in which was located a telephone for public use by the building's tenants. I would have to make my resignation using this telephone, since I couldn't imagine doing so in person. I couldn't possibly enter the office of the temporary supervisor, as Blecher had done. I couldn't go into that room enclosed by heavily frosted glass behind which I and my fellow workers had observed something that appeared in various forms and manifestations, from an indistinct shape that seemed to shift and churn like a dark cloud to something more defined that appeared to have a 'head part' and 'arm-protrusions.' Given this situation, I would use the telephone to call the closest regional center and make my resignation to the appropriate person in charge of such matters.
The telephone niche at the end of the hallway outside my apartment was so narrow that I had to enter it sideways. In the confines of that space there was barely enough room to make the necessary movements of placing coins in the telephone that hung on the wall and barely enough light to see what number one was dialing. I remember how concerned I was not to dial a wrong number and thereby lose a portion of what little money I had. After taking every possible precaution to insure that I would successfully complete my phone call, a process that seemed to take hours, I reached someone at the closest regional center operated by the company.
The phone rang so many times that I feared no one would ever answer. Finally the ringing stopped and, after a pause, I heard a barely audible voice. It sounded thin and distant.
'Quine Organization, Northwest Regional Center.'
'Yes,' I began. 'I would like to resign my position at the company,' I said.
'I'm sorry, did you say that you wanted to resign from the company? You sound so far away,' said the voice.
'Yes, I want to resign,' I shouted into the mouthpiece of the telephone. 'I want to resign. Can you hear me?'
'Yes, I can hear you. But the company is not accepting resignations at this time. I'm going to transfer you to our temporary supervisor.'
'Wait,' I said, but the transfer had been made and once again the phone began ringing so many times that I feared no one would answer.
Then the ringing stopped, although no voice came on the line. 'Hello,' I said. But all I could hear was an indistinct, though highly reverberant, noise—a low roaring sound that alternately faded and swelled as if it were echoing through vast spaces deep within the caverns of the earth or across a clouded sky. This noise, this low and bestial roaring, affected me with a dread I could not name. I held the telephone receiver away from my ear, but the roaring noise continued to sound within my head. Then I felt the telephone quivering in my hand, pulsing like something that was alive. And when I slammed the telephone receiver back into its cradle, this quivering and pulsing sensation continued to move up my arm, passing through my body and finally reaching my brain where it became synchronized with the low roaring noise which was now growing louder and louder, confusing my thoughts into an echoing insanity and paralyzing my movements so that I could not even scream for help.
I was never sure that I had actually made that telephone call to resign my position at the company. And if in fact I did make such a call, I could never be certain that what I experienced—what I heard and felt in that telephone niche at the end of the hallway outside my apartment—in any way resembled the dreams which recurred every night after I stopped showing up for work at the factory. No amount of medication I took could prevent the nightly onset of these dreams, and no amount of medication could efface their memory from my mind. Soon enough I had taken so much medication that I didn't have a sufficient amount left to overdose my system, as Blecher had done. And since I was no longer employed, I could not afford to get my prescription refilled and thereby acquire the medication I needed to tolerate my existence. Of course I might have done away with myself in some other manner, should I have been so inclined. But somehow I still retained higher hopes for my life. Accordingly, I returned to see if I could get my job back at the factory. After all, hadn't the person I spoke with at the regional center told me that the Quine Organization was not accepting resignations at this time?
Of course I couldn't be sure what I had been told over the telephone, or even if I had made such a call to resign my position with the company. It wasn't until I actually walked onto the floor of the factory that I realized I still had a job there if I wanted one, for the place where I had stood for such long hours at my assembly block was unoccupied. Already attired in my gray work clothes, I walked over to the assembly block and began fitting together, at a furious pace, those small metal pieces. Without pausing in my task I looked across the assembly block at the person I had once thought of as the 'new man.'
'Welcome back,' he said in a casual voice.
'Thank you,' I replied.
'I told Mr Frowley that you would return any day now.'
For a moment I was overjoyed at the implicit news that the temporary supervisor was gone and Mr Frowley was back managing the factory. But when I looked over at his office in the corner I noticed that behind the heavily frosted glass there were no lights on, although the large-bodied outline of Mr Frowley could be distinguished sitting behind his desk. Nevertheless, he was a changed man, as I discovered soon after returning to work. No one and nothing at the factory would ever again be as it once was. We were working practically around the clock now. Some of us began to stay the night at the factory, sleeping for an hour or so in a corner before going back to work at our assembly blocks.
After returning to work I no longer suffered from the nightmares that had caused me to go running back to the factory in the first place. And yet I continued to feel, if somewhat faintly, the atmosphere of those nightmares, which was so like the atmosphere our temporary supervisor had brought to the factory. I believe that this feeling of the overseeing presence of the temporary supervisor was a calculated measure on the part of the Quine Organization, which is always making adjustments and refinements in the way it does business.
The company retained its policy of not accepting resignations. It even extended this policy at some point and would not allow retirements. We were all prescribed new medications, although I can't say exactly how many years ago that happened. No one at the factory can remember how long we've worked here, or how old we are, yet our pace and productivity continues to increase. It seems as if neither the company nor our temporary supervisor will ever be done with us. Yet we are only human beings, or at least physical beings, and one day we must die. This is the only retirement we can expect, even though none of us is looking forward to that time. For we can't keep from wondering what might come afterward—what the company could have planned for us, and the part our temporary supervisor might play in that plan. Working at a furious pace, fitting together those small pieces of metal, helps keep our minds off such things.
The Mechanical Museum (2002)
First published in The Evil Entwines, 2002
Like the rest of the world, I have spent my life searching for a way to annihilate myself. Others might prefer to characterise this more or less futile project as using such expressions as "to lose oneself," or "to get out of oneself." I have no objection t
o these variant wordings and have even called on them myself to explain what I mean by the phrase "to annihilate myself," although these explanations are also more or less futile. To these previous explanations may be added the subjoined account, or discourse of delirium, if one prefers.
***
It has been said that shrines and temples are best visited at night and during a time that is out of season. I followed this advice when I travelled to a degenerate resort town and along one of its backstreets found the place called The Mechanical Museum. At that time there seemed good reason believe that this was the kind of place I was seeking: a temple in which the services of self-annihilation were offered, or at least a shrine paying homage to the creed, the wordless dream of those who would be annihilated before it is too late. This peculiar visitation, at night and out of season, appeared to my mind as a brilliant scheme, one that I had been working towards in so many ways throughout my life. And the manner in which this scheme presented itself was fatally persuasive.
I had already given up all hope of annihilating myself and one evening sat down at a small table in a small room to write my last words. There seemed to be no question that this would be the last room that my body would inhabit, the last time I would sit down to write my last words at that small table. Yet afterwards I had no memory of having written anything at all. I had forgotten myself for a time and when I came back to myself I saw that instead writing my last words, as I had intended, I had written only three words: The Mechanical Museum. Somewhat astonished, I knew that these words merely referred to a place I had visited as a child, a simple amusement arcade located along a backstreet in an obscure resort town that even then was on the verge of degeneration. Since that time the memory of this resort-town attraction had now and again come to my mind, and on several occasions I had even written those words, The Mechanical Museum, for one reason or another. But I had never written them in a state in which I had forgotten, or lost myself, if only for a few moments. And I had certainly never written them in a style of handwriting that was clearly not my own but that of another hand, and presumably of another self. Possibly one that had finally discovered the secret of annihilation.
Thus, when I arrived in the degenerate resort town I was under the spell of a desperate ecstasy simply to find that this place still existed, however close it may have to the brink of total degeneration. And when I found the the amusement arcade still in operation along a deserted backstreet of the town, I was filled with faith in my scheme to visit this place as a pilgrimage to a temple or a shrine, entering its open door at night and out of season. Above that door were coloured lights that spelled out the words The Mechanical Museum. From inside I heard the sound of soft, strange music.
Alone in this dim emporium, unwatched by anyattendants, or patrons, or even by the curator of this tawdry institution, I moved from one mechanical exhibit to another amazed at how much they resembled my memory of them, or rather the dreams I had experienced over the years of this distant memory. For in those long-passed days of childhood I was barely tall enough to reach the thin slots in which I dropped a coin or two that set in motion the mechanisms within a rectangular glass case which seemed so far beyond my vision. Now I could look into those cases at eye-level, as I had always dreamed of doing. I felt all the faith in the world in the brilliance of my scheme to make this pilgrimage to The Mechanical Museum, and to proceed from one machine to another, following what I believed was a formula for deliverance that would conclude in my annihilation. Like the rest of the world I could not resist the idea that my search was almost at an end. No one can resist such an idea, least of all when it is put into our minds in the hours of the night and during a time that is out of season.
The Gravedigger
For a few moments I was allowed to be at ease in the land of the dead. For a few coins I could activate one of the machines at The Mechanical Museum and cause a cemetery to glow into pale visibility, as if illuminated by the cut-out circle of moon dangling from a thin wire in the dark distance of the phony horizon. On the other side of the machine's glass, all the sights of the toy necropolis came to life and I gazed my way into the Gravedigger's habitat.
He was positioned at the front edge of his crude and wonderful world, his back turned to my invading eyes. There was a tiny shovel in his tiny hands, and his stiff, mechanical arms moved back and forth, pitching invisible earth into the open grave at his feet, a grave that was forever in progress. Nestled in this shallow pit was a miniature coffin, a humble box without adornments. The headstone above the grave was a small ivory-coloured square fixed to the gritty ground, as were all the others. But no inscriptions could be read upon them in the pasteboard moonlight. Crooked shadows were cast by frail, leafless trees and by the thin posts of the gates which traced a twisting perimeter about the cemetery landscape.
And for a few moments I was allowed to be at ease in the land of the dead, watching the Gravedigger in a trance as his mechanical arms pumped back and forth, his shovel throwing not earth but empty air upon that coffin whose grave was not as deep as a grave should be.
Yet I lost myself in the Gravedigger's good work and felt the soft weight of dirt in my shovel's blade. I was at home beneath my moon and mindlessly at peace among a world of coffined bodies settled into the ground where I had put them forever. And forever I would be filling this final grave, eternally at burial in an eternal night, silently staring earthward in the stillness and shadows, my arms in perfect motion, my shovel swinging back and forth to bury the dead, this being the only action, the only stirring within an infinite darkness.
Then the Gravedigger froze in his movements; his pitching shovel came to a stop. For a few moments I had been allowed to be at ease in the land of the dead. But at the end the Gravedigger's head haltingly swivelled about and the mad expression carved upon his wooden face cast me forever out his mechanical paradise.
***
A deep sense of loss had now been instilled within me, yet for a few seconds I had also experienced the 'absolute loss' of myself. Perhaps this departure of self should be viewed as a form of temporal annihilation; two minutes of my existence had been expertly buried by a vacated form of consciousness in the guise of the Gravedigger, but once he had abruptly ceased his good work, my spiritual self had been quick to rise from the dead. By the very act of digging, I had become a contented combination of both Gravedigger and corpse, yet for all my unflagging work to cover and conceal, always had the grave been far too shallow to prevent my instant resurrection.
All could do now was mourn my loss.
The Sleeper
I became as though a moth to a constant and unnecessary light. A small town was brightly lit by the descending beam from an overhead spotlight; this corner of The Mechanical Museum appeared at odds with the distant memory of my childhood visitation, and yet there was some aspect about this particular machine's melancholy streets, that seemed vaguely familiar. I had my suspicions, but to throw more light upon these I would need to be gifted darkness. Just a few coins and the overhead beam dimmed to nothingness. Beneath the glass case lighted a sequence of occasional street-lamps, their yellow glow hardly penetrating the fresh darkness of that small, degenerate town. A mechanical moon began to rise slowly upwards by way of a steel spindle, the tiny bulbs within its glass crescent casting grotesque shadows via the manufactured branches of dark, leafless trees. These fell almost claw-like upon the walls of many dream-haunted houses.
My intruding eyes gazed through the lace curtains of one upstairs window, and the comforting glow of a night-light spread over a small single bed. Rested upon a pillow I saw the wooden countenance of an eternally sleeping child, while tiny squares of cloth blanket rose and fell with the rhythmic timings of sweet oblivion. Strings of sentiment tugged at my soul, and like some emotional marionette, I warmed until I became moulded into his mind of innocent dreams.
Identity became lost to me in one instant, and so I entered within the eternal dreams of the Sleeper. In ethereal form I
wandered the dark streets of that town, revelling in the essence of past and future dream, and delighting in the lonesomeness and seclusion that now enveloped the Sleeper. The unreal world of another had become home to me, and being now able to realise this fact, I knew with certainty that a true annihilation of my former self would soon become complete.
Very swiftly all sign of memory faded to become replaced by the on-going construction of infinite possibility. I felt the coldness of the eternal night, then looked upwards to see the crescent moon moving slowly through the blackened skies. Contentment reigned in me, so that I became invisibly escorted through these desolate streets of my new home, but always walking to the tune of my own undreamt dream. Though when the music of this dream began to seem vaguely familiar to me, I became quick to encounter the fleeting presence of unaccountable unease.
Over the unworn cobbles of narrow alleys and backstreets I roamed, elated at the escape I had made from my forgotten confines. Yet eventually I was certain I heard a soulless screaming coming from beyond the door of some long-forgotten attraction. Entering through that door beneath a sign of coloured lights, I became temporarily blinded by a sudden beam of bright, white light. When my eyes saw again, the crescent moon had descended from the blackened skies above that small town within the glass case, and the return of the spotlight made it no longer possible to peer through those lace curtains into the bedroom of the Sleeper.
All around me still played the soft, strange music of his formerly undreamt dream, but I had now filled with much hatred and envy at the thought of that eternally sleeping child and how he had betrayed me.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 117