“The idea of exteriorizing muscular exertions—an idea I’ve wound through every convolution of my brain—is entirely practicable. If we take the neuromuscular junction, we see that the nerve fiber transmitting an impulse strives, by splitting into very fine fibrils, to encase the muscle in a sort of—sponge, please—net. Krause gave us our first histological description, but this perfectly exact picture of the nerve net’s weave is mine. Hmm . . . Now what was I . . . Oh, yes. The trick is this: to catch the net in a net and bring that catch to shore, out of a person’s skin. Now if you will look closely at the absorberator’s stipple of pores, you will see that . . .”
Leker spoke for nearly two hours. His last word was followed by several minutes of silence. Then the chairman, the yellow corners of his eyes twitching, said, “That’s all very well, but are you sure that those reserves of human spite, which you propose to exploit, are sufficiently large and dependable? After all, one would be dealing here not with stratified deposits awaiting a pickax but with an emotion that ebbs and flows. Do I make myself clear?”
Professor Leker replied with a dry “Perfectly.”
The commissioners were tight-lipped as to the possibility of using yellow coal for industrial purposes. They decided that the project had better begin on a small scale and confine itself to prospect mining.
4
This happened early one morning before office hours on the outskirts of a European capital. A two-car tram trundled round a loop and up to a tram stop thronged with harried briefcases. Briefcases jammed onto both cars without noticing the somewhat unorthodox construction of the one behind: a yellow stripe ran down its shiny red side; thin threadlike wires sprouting from the handrails plunged under the car’s metal skin; the brass-plated seats were dotted with small pores that disappeared somewhere deep inside.
A bell tinkled from car to car, the driver ducked down between the buffers, then ran back; he flicked the main switch, and the front car, now rid of its crowded trailer, sailed off. For a few seconds, the passengers in the abandoned car looked bewildered. Then all those hands thrown up in surprise began to clench into fists. Spite, exacerbated by its own impotence, turned to rage and set all mouths in motion.
“How can they do that, leave us here, like rubbish?”
“Scoundrels!”
“Have you ever heard of such a thing? Filthy wretches!”
“Ought to be locked up . . .”
“I’d strangle them first, with my bare hands . . .”
As if in answer to the spray of spit and venom, the trailer, axles softly grinding, suddenly started up. It had no trolley on top, no driver in the driver’s seat, and yet, mysteriously gaining speed, the car bowled off after its mate. Passengers exchanged anxious glances; a woman screamed for help. Seized with panic, the car’s entire contents lunged for the doors. Everyone wanted to go first. Shoulders pressed against shoulders, elbows against elbows; the stiff human dough kneaded itself with a hundred fists. “Out of my way!” “Move over!” “Let me through!” “I can’t bre-e-eathe!” Now the car, which had begun to slow down, barreled ahead at full speed. Spilling off the running boards onto the painful pavement, passengers gradually vacated the incomprehensible trailer. Then its wheels juddered to a halt. Ten yards short of the next tram stop. Without listening to explanations, a new crowd of passengers scrabbled aboard, and a minute later, steel grinding against steel, the car’s yellow stripe was again cleaving the air.
That evening the extraordinary trailer was shunted back to the park, but its photographic image continued to roam inside the millions of pupils that had perused the evening papers. A sensation, it reverberated over the wires and screamed from every loudspeaker. That day marked the beginning of a new industrial era on earth.
5
During the first months of the gradual changeover to yellow-coal energy, it was feared that the reserves of human spite might soon be exhausted. Various ancillary projects proposed methods of stimulating spite artificially—in case natural supplies should fall off. It was in this spirit that the ethnographer Krantz published his Classification of Interethnic Hatreds, a two-volume work asserting that humanity should be split into the smallest possible ethnicities so as to produce the maximum “kinetic spite” (Krantz’s term). But the anonymous author of a pamphlet titled “Once One Is One” went further; he called for a return to the ancient bellum omnium contra omnes, war of all against all. The post-historical war contra omnes would, he reasoned, differ radically from the prehistorical one. Where the former had set all men against all due to their lack of an “I,” the latter would create a conflict between excesses of “I”; once put into practice, every “I” would lay claim to the whole earth and all its riches. This eminently logical philosophical system would saddle the earth with some three billion absolute monarchs and, in consequence, countless wars of aggression and spite, the approximate number of which could be determined by calculating all possible combinations of one individual against three billion other individuals and multiplying that number again by three billion.
Most popular of all, however, was a book by the psychologist Jules Chardon, The Optical Couple. A master of the art of metaphor, Chardon began by comparing double stars to married couples. As in astronomy, where double stars may be either physical (close to each other in space) or optical (separated by dozens of light years but close to each other as seen from Earth), so in matrimoniology, the study of those marital unions most profitable to mankind. If until now love within the system of matrimonial reflexes benefited the State, then with the switch to the use of spite-driven bodies, the institution of marriage would have to be reformed: The rate of optical marriages would have to be gradually increased to 100 percent. Coldness and, where possible, repugnance multiplied by proximity would produce high-voltage spite that need only be sucked into personal absorberators and channeled along wires to a central accumulator that would funnel all spites, the entire flow of bile, into a common yellow reserve.
It would be impossible to list all the methods suggested to artificially increase supplies of absorberator-grade spite. It soon became clear, however, that these artificial spite stimulants were all but unnecessary; natural reserves of this energy in its various forms, ranging from disgust to fury, were indeterminably vast and, evidently, inexhaustible.
It turned out that the energy of a potential fistfight, if sucked promptly into the pores of a street absorberator, could heat an entire floor for twelve hours. Even without adopting any matrimoniological measures, simply by giving porous double beds to two million “happily married” couples, you could support the work of an enormous sawmill.
Life was changing at a feverish pace and being entirely re-equipped. The doorways of offices and shops were made narrower, the better to collect with their invisible pores the energy of bodies shoving in and shoving out. Boulevard benches, the backs of theater seats, worktables, and workbenches were all fitted with special porous sockets to absorb the emulsions of bile: drops turned into streams, streams into floods, and floods into boiling, bubbling seas.
Shivers of hatred, fits of anger, and paroxysms of rage plunged into wires and were transformed into the steel squeals of saws, the vibrations of pistons, and the grinding of gearwheels.
The day’s accumulation of ill will, once it had been yellowed into the coals of arched streetlamps, was allowed to softly low over the beam-spangled night.
6
Mr. Francis Deddle was against the bilification of life, and he was not alone. No need to look very far: His parish priest and his wife’s sister, a girl of about forty with the hands of a devout scullery maid, felt the same way. Sermons from several pulpits had already denounced the yellow delusion polluting the world. A papal encyclical—delayed for some reason—was expected shortly.
The opposition was gradually growing. Although yellow-coal converts derided the anti-bilists as nothing but cassocks and skirts, in actual fact they underestimated their adversary’s numbers. The paper put out by the protesters—
Heart Versus Liver—was quite popular.
Mr. Deddle, a founding member of the Heartfelt Organization, was also one of its most active. True, he had to work with his hands tied. The government saw Heartfelt propaganda as wrecking the yellow cause. Philanthropic societies were closed, and sermons preached to empty pews. The Heartfelt Organization was up against a wall (and that wall was stippled with absorberating pores).
One morning Mr. Deddle woke up feeling extremely depressed. Under his door, along with that day’s edition of Heart Versus Liver, was an envelope. It contained a directive from the Central Committee of the Heartfelts: “Sir, within two hours of receiving this letter, you are requested to love humanity. Salvation begins at home.”
Mr. Deddle fiddled with the piece of paper and knew that the day was ruined. The hour hand on the clock showed nine. Catching sight of the Roman eleven, Mr. Deddle muttered, “Well, there’s still time.” He squinted in an effort to picture that hazy many-headedness called humanity. Then he raised himself up on one elbow, opened the newspaper, and glanced over the headlines: “Oh no! Well, well . . . So that’s it! Damn!” He crumpled the paper up and threw it on the floor: “Now be calm, be calm, old man, by eleven o’clock you have to . . .” Deddle smiled dreamily and began to dress. Walking past the crumpled newssheet, he bent down, picked it up, and carefully smoothed out the lines of print.
At a quarter to ten Mr. Deddle sat down to breakfast. Two or three slices of ham to start, followed by the tap of his teaspoon on the top of a boiled egg. The yolk, welling up out of the shell like an evil eye, reminded him that . . . Mr. Deddle suddenly lost his appetite and pushed the plate away. The hour hand was edging toward ten. “I really ought to, hmm, do something. I can’t simply sit here.” But just then the telephone bell jangled through the air. “I won’t answer it. They can go to the devil!” The telephone paused, then began ringing again with greater urgency. Deddle pressed his ear to the instrument with a feeling of annoyance.
“Hello! Yes, speaking. Call back after eleven: I’m busy. With a matter of great importance to all mankind. Urgent, you say? So is this. What? I’m busy I tell you, and you keep insisting, like a . . .”
The receiver returned incensed to its hook. Mr. Deddle, hands clasped behind his back, began pacing to and fro. His eye lit on the thin glass tube sticking out of the absorberator that had covered his wall—like all walls in all rooms the world over—with barely visible pores. The mercury in the graduated glass tube was slowly rising. “Can I really be . . .? No, no. I must get to work!” Deddle went to the window and peered down at the street: The pavement was, as always, black with people; they were thronging the sidewalks, pouring out of all the doors and gates.
“Sweet humanity, dear humanity,” Deddle stammered. He could feel his fingers tightening into an involuntary fist as prickles shivered down his spine, vertebra by vertebra.
The windowpanes rattled and knocked with the hoarse hoots of motor horns, while the soft flesh of the crowd, squeezing out of every crack, went on being well kneaded between the street’s walls.
“Dearest people, my brothers, oh, how I . . .” Deddle’s teeth gritted. “Good Lord, how can that be? Twenty to eleven, and I . . .”
Deddle curtained the street and, trying not to look at the graduated glass tube, sank into an armchair.
“Let’s try in abstracto. Exert yourself, old man, and love those scoundrels. At least for fifteen minutes, at least a little bit. Go on and love them just to spite them. Damn, it’s already five to. Oh Lord, help me! Work a miracle, make all men love their neighbors. Well, humanity, get ready because here I go: My beloved—”
A soft glassy tinkle made Deddle start and turn his sweat-dappled face toward the absorberator: The glass tube, unable to withstand the tension, had exploded, spattering mercury all over the floor.
7
Though the technique of extracting and accumulating yellow coal met with failures at first, it gradually improved to the point of ruling out accidents such as the one just described. Meanwhile, the word “failure” took on a new meaning, for it was life’s failures, the spiteful malcontents, who adapted best to the new culture. Their grudge against life was now remunerative, the source of a tidy income. The entire human race had to retrain. Portable counters, worn by one and all, calculated one’s pay rate based on Amount of Spite Radiated. The slogan BE ANGRY OR GO HUNGRY floated in huge letters above every crossroad. Good-natured and softhearted people were thrown out into the street where they either died or became hardened. In the latter case, the numbers on their individual counters surged and saved them from starving to death.
Even before Leker’s idea was introduced, a special CANOE subcommittee had been formed to study the possibility of exploiting class hatred. The subcommittee worked in secret: CANOE members were well aware that this variety of hatred required extreme caution. The yellow-coal conversion had naturally led to unrest among workers in obsolete industries. Meanwhile, the capitalists, hand in glove with CANOE, abandoned the old policy of appeasing workers who bore grievances against the exploiter class. Now that hatred of exploitation could be . . .exploited for industrial purposes, collected by an absorberator, and pumped into engines and machines. Mills could get by with workers’ hatred alone; the workers themselves were no longer needed. Factories and mills began laying huge numbers of people off, keeping only skeleton crews to man the spite collectors. The wave of protests and strikes that swept the globe only swelled the bilious energy in accumulators and gave good dividends. It turned out that the very purest spite—it hardly needed to be filtered—was produced by the unemployed. At the first conference on spite collection, a respected German economist declared that a bright new day was dawning when work would be done with the help of strikes. A guarded swash of gloating applause greeted his words. The glass tubes on the absorberators in the conference hall trembled slightly.
8
Indeed, the world had entered a golden age. And no need to hack through the earth’s crust for the gold, no need to pan for it in streams—it seeped out of the liver all by itself in bilious yellow drops; it was right here, under a few layers of skin. One’s liver had become a tightly stuffed and miraculously inexhaustible purse that one carried not in one’s pocket but deep inside one’s body where no thief could reach. It was convenient and portable. A tiff with one’s wife bought a three-course lunch. The hunchback’s envy of his handsome rival allowed the hunchback—once he had shifted the gold in his inside pocket to an outer one, as it were—to console himself with a high-priced cocotte. All in all, life was getting cheaper and easier by the day. The energy from accumulators was building new buildings, expanding cramped quadratures, turning shacks into palaces, dressing existence not in gray sackcloth but in elaborate and colorful costumes; the precipitate flood of bile, transformed into fuel, washed the soot from the sky and the mud from the earth. If before people had lived jammed together, cheek by jowl in dark cubbyholes, now they lived in vast, high-ceilinged rooms with French windows wide to the sun. If before cheap boots, as though stung by their cheapness, had bit into one’s heels with their nails, now neatly sewn soles floated like velvet underfoot. If before the village poor had shivered by unheated stoves, their cadaverous faces concealing a hopeless, centuries-old spite, now that reservoir of spite warmed the snakelike coils of their electric heaters, creating coziness and comfort. Now everyone was well fed. Instead of yellow hollows, plump rosy cheeks. Figures gained inches, stomachs and gestures became round, and livers became coated with a soft fatty film. That was the beginning of the end.
Outwardly everything seemed fine: machines working at full tilt, the human flood pressing against the cracks in doorways, yellow-coal accumulators transmitting energy along wires and through the air. But here and there, odd things unforeseen by Leker’s blueprint began to happen. One fine autumn day in Berlin, for instance, the police detained three people who could not stop smiling. This was outrageous. The chief of police, his florid face encased in a tight yellow collar, sta
mped his feet and shouted at the offenders: “Today you take it into your heads to smile in a public place, tomorrow you’ll be running through the streets naked!”
The three smiles were convicted of hooliganism and made to pay a fine.
Another case was far more serious: A young man on a tram had the temerity to give up his seat to an old crone half flattened by the press of elbows and shoulders. Even after being shown Article 4 of the Rules and Regulations for Passengers (Giving up one’s seat is punishable by a prison term of up to . . .), he refused to take his seat back. As for the old crone, she too, so the papers said, was profoundly shocked by the lout’s behavior.
A rash of puzzling incidents began to spread over the globe’s gigantic body. Highly symptomatic was the scandalous trial of a schoolteacher who, during class, openly declared: “Children should love their parents.”
His pupils were, of course, baffled by the archaic word “love” and asked their parents what it meant; many parents could not recall. But their parents explained the odious phrase, and the corrupter of youth was sent before a jury of judges. In a still more sensational twist, the judges acquitted the rascal. Now the government began to fret. The yellow press (the press in that era was all yellow) raised a hue and cry, demanding that the ruling be overturned. Pictures of the substitute judges ran in all the special editions—but their faces, plastered across those sheets, were strangely amiable, plump, and insouciant. As a result, the corrupter remained at large.
Autobiography of a Corpse Page 17