Same Same

by Peter Mendelsund

  “One of us will be back for you.”

  Ten long minutes later, in which I seriously consider the possibility that a mistake had been made, and that perhaps I should slink away (can’t: no clothes), a new admin/orderly appears, wearing a uniform of dull pink. He hands me a towel, which I quickly attempt to wrap myself in. Unfortunately, it is too small for total coverage, so I am forced to merely hold it in front of me. Fig leaf. Better than nothing, I think.

  I am led out, and downward, via a grand, open, marble spiral staircase. There, in the artificial twilight, I see several other workers, these also in pink, instructing other fellows, shepherding them in and out of the system of rooms at regular intervals while monitoring temperature charts. Other admins are also present, in blue, for those fellows who suffer from specific complaints (the new admin explains), mostly nervous disorders and other various psychogenic illnesses brought on by creative impulses (palsies, contractions, rheums, cold tumors, affects of the skin, aches, etc., etc.), all of which are to be treated through balneology, hydrotherapy, and physiotherapy. My guide runs through all this in a clipped, rote recitation.

  He tells me how the spa works. The primary takeaway is that the treatment consists of an intensely regimented cycle of stations, leading one inexorably out from heat and up through frost.

  When we reach the first of the inward spiraling chambers, I am told to hand over my meager towel, which I do without complaint, though with extreme embarrassment. I enter a series of overhead showers. All the spigots are off, and I search for dials or handles and find none. I stand, bewildered, under the vast heads, on the tile floor, listening intently for any sounds, any sounds which might forewarn…

  The water rains down.

  It lasts a short time.

  Emerging from the stalls, I get my towel back and am led into a sauna; the large door is closed behind me. In the perimeter-less room of many tiled tiers, I choose the lowest one to sit upon. I am handed a compress, which has been doused in water, to place around my neck as the heat rises, and so I do this, but in a matter of minutes any residual coolness is gone from it. Large orange heat lamps shine down upon me like demonic eyes. I look over and think I see Disputant 1 or 2, or someone with a similar shape. A baleful gaze from under a towel. Hunched over like this in his whites, he looks like an ancient and corrupt pope—an anti-pope—and, watching him, a drowsiness begins to come over me as I bake in the intense, dry heat, both of us quietly demonstrative to one another that all conversation is inappropriate here. Our near silence lasts through the entire portion of this medicinal cycle; and in the end, I am not sure if it is even him. Or anyone. Meanwhile the heat passes through various points of unbearableness until I almost lose consciousness and only with the help of the bath attendants I am hoisted to my feet and led out of the scalding chamber and into the next station.

  This is the “cold room,” a chilled, dark space, spiced with faux terpene scenticles, an odor which I am told is sovereign in treating, mollifying, cleansing, resolving a variety of complaints. The roof above me is bedazzled with rhinestones, and in the scant light they sparkle like faraway stars. The cold here is, at first, felt only as an absence of heat, and in direct relation to it, before becoming a positive factor in its own right. I breathe as deeply as possible, and can almost imagine myself alone in an ice cave on some faraway northern shore.

  Time passes.

  A tinkling sounds through a speaker, and I am escorted out and across to my third environment: steam.

  This room is almost impossible to mentally encompass. Upon entering, I cannot see any walls, just endless fog. It is only after exploring using touch that objects (or people?) are found, and, circumnavigating the room in this way, proceeding along the wall leftward all the way to the utmost shore, groping with my hands, I find that it is a great, tiled circle, ringed by an enormous bench. Great gasps can be heard from vents as the floor exhales its hissing steam. I take up my position, and sit, hunched. A new towel is handed to me by a pink shape, and I drape it over my head to catch perspiration. This serves only to lend a further hieratic atmosphere to the already myth-laden space.

  A low and accented voice comes on over a loudspeaker, and I am given a short, but interesting lecture on steam, on its ambiguities—being neither aether nor matter—and a lesson on what this intermediary state can teach one about the nature of boundaries. The voice describes the mechanical process through which this vapor is made available to us, and concludes with an informative speech concerning taxonomies of matter. When the presentation has finished, it begins again, but this time in German. (Next, French.)

  I listen, and the room seethes, and around this disembodied voice, in descant, I can make out other quiet voices in the murk—no doubt belonging to other fellows—though after only ten minutes in the miasma anything becomes possible, and the vague sounds and shapes of my cohorts could, once again, be evidence of anyone or anything. One such adumbration is so large that at first I think it a structural element of the room, a pillar, or even a small tower in the distance. Huge—though this very well could have been a trick of the fog, a refraction or mirage. I try to reconfigure my sight to accommodate this shape, but it refuses to resolve into anything recognizable. Now it twitches, and I shoot backward in fear. Had it moved? Everything here in this necropolis is uncertainty. As I breathe in the scent of what I believe to be a woodbine air-freshener (for there could be no such thing as the real deal, as a health-giving thermal spring, in a desert such as this one), I think suddenly that the shape is certainly a very large man. When it dawns on me with a sudden, coppery dread that it is certainly the Director, and that I have been led into one of his infernal offices.

  “Hello?” I probe.

  “Sdfgiyssisudfibssamècchezzzabìalmiiiszzdfhoss,” comes the response from across the way.

  “What?”

  “Vibroskomenotaf blaf blaf.”

  An abject terror grips me and I feel my gorge begin to rise. A series of scenarios present themselves in rapid succession like posts on a diabolical feed: the monster rises and in two quick strides is upon me, grappling me in its immense and naked bulk, slippery and malodorous and inescapable, loose flesh enveloping me, my project incomplete, my corporeal body forcibly merged into his epidermal mass…

  “Who are you speaking to?” asks the pink-suited admin, suddenly and puzzlingly by my side.

  “I thought—”

  “Yes?”

  The heat keeps falling fresh while he waits for me to finish this sentence, which I cannot, and don’t. But then there is a brassy clang from a hidden speaker which indicates that my time in the steam room is at an end, and as the mists begin to dissipate, I see that I had been in error, what had been concealed was nothing at all, except a superimposition of my own imagination upon the blank ground of the shifting white fog. What had I heard? Who knows. But my ears are now both hermetically sealed against the world of sonic frequencies by the water which has infiltrated them. I hop on one leg, and then the other, in order to drain my head, but am unsuccessful.

  Out I come, soaked and rubbery, and back into the cold showers with me. Now, I’m led by the attendants into a room filled with tables, each one piled high with towels, and other fellows under these towels. I am directed wordlessly to lie facedown, a semicircular extension cradling my head, a big U, a bed for my cheeks to rest in, so that all I can see is the basin of a bowl placed beneath me for the purpose of catching the sweat and saliva as it falls from my propped face.

  The thrashings begin.

  The red-coveralled attendants beat me with plastic switches which sting my back, the backs of my legs and arms. And even as I convulse beneath the bright blows, the pain feels most welcome; in direct contradiction to the soporific grayness from which I have just emerged. I am rubbed down with a synthetic lubricant, some sort of sweet glycerin. I am roughly pulled upward onto one side, rubbed along my entire length
, and then flipped onto the other and rubbed in a similar manner.

  It is at this stage, as I lie here passively, that I begin to feel more at home in this strange underground realm. The world at the apex of those spiral stairs I so recently came down seems so very far away. Compared to this regimented underworld with its Bardos and Malbolges, the outside suddenly strikes me as being a place of hazards and random event. And, just briefly, I find myself imagining that I’d not see the dazzling sky ever again—I have crossed a shore into this land of heat and ice, an almost allegorical haunt, the Institute’s inner sanctum (the Institute itself being an inner sanctum of a sort), and I had allowed myself to become a full citizen of these inner realms, surrendering my body and will to them in a manner which I never could imitate up above and outside.

  And just at this moment of complete surrender to these regimens, someone whispers into my ventral ear: “The next station awaits you.”

  So I am once again helped to a sitting position, and allowed to suffer my head-rushes and reacquaint myself with being upright.

  Another cold blast in the shower. And I am shepherded into a winding corridor leading to an impressive door, with a heavy handle. I pull it, leaning back to better leverage my weight against its bulk. Now, I see a series of casket-like tubs, each filled with some kind of greasy mud. I am guided into one, and the churning clay receives me with a series of impolite sucking sounds, like I am being slurped into this coffin for the purposes of being digested by it.

  What is this mud? I’m not sure. Perhaps it is dredged by local workers from kilometers-deep wells beneath the hot sands. Perhaps it is cement, or pitchblende, or raw petroleum. I am not told. But its viscous heat firmly adheres to every contour of my comatose body, and I lie there, looking mostly at the stucco hanging down from the ceiling of the dolorous chamber, allowing myself to have a brain as muddy as the deliquescent solids I am now enwombed in, and think of the seminary spirit of minerals, whose prescripts matter must obey; and how they slosh about me, never idle, but always in action, preparing me, impregnating me, with what I am not sure. Visions, perhaps. Something in the slime vapors up and rubs against my mind. Halfway through the action here, between one hill climbed, and another perhaps yet to be climbed, in a delicious middle point of the fulcrum, curled, lazy. Such a Belacquan position corresponding precisely (geographically as well as metaphorically) to that of the Institute itself, a stasis so profound, found centrally, the origin point of X and Y, perfectly inert, between the outside world’s ceaseless traffic and the position representing some kind of future transcendence; this is to say that I (and by extension the Institute as well) repose at the moment in a state of utter inaction that only the freedoms afforded by such colony fellowships are apt to engender.

  I look beside me, and, perfect timing: there is another fellow (the Poet?) in the sepulcher next to mine, motionless as a statue. Next to him is another occupied tub, a limp arm hanging over its lip. A female arm. Pale as could be. The ashen arm and hand, in direct contrast to the bright and glossy nails. Who, having sepulture in these tombs, makes themselves audible with doleful sighs; a woman? Arching upward, and peering through the haze, I can see that she is turned sideways, practically facedown, in her container. One of her eyes is just above the mud, and is wide open, and strangely unblinking. Is it Miss Fairfax? Miss ☺ the Brand Analyst? The Mysterious Woman? A woman, surely…Wait, I thought, how can she breathe?

  “Mr. Frobisher.”

  I sit right up in my tub, peer out, see something; and a struggle commences in my brain to make of it a man, and it is a man, and it is most certainly the Director.

  “Sir?”

  He silences me with a raised hand. He seems to be wearing a long robe of some kind. A long medallion around his neck, ending in a small, jeweled serpent’s eye.

  The Director’s face like a mask.

  Two attendants grab me under my arms and pull me up to standing in my sarcophagus, a risen golem, mud slowly oozing down and off of me.

  A bell is ringing. Then stops. Then begins again, slightly more rapidly.

  I feel no control over my body.

  I am under the sway of some sort of vague command. I feel a strange tremor in my head.

  I raise one finger.

  Why? I raise another finger. Stop it!

  (Am I supposed to speak?)

  By now, several other figures have emerged, and are now standing near the Director. There are two people on either side of him, all of them mummified in white cloth, draped in towels. A small parliament.

  They have me smell.

  They have me taste.

  They have me see.

  They have me listen.

  They have me feel.

  They have me work.

  They have me read.

  They inquired into the content and nature of my thinking.

  They put their hands on my cheek, in a slow-motion slap.

  Then another man, tall and thin, stooped, second on the right from the Director, steps out of the line to address the others. He does so plainly and professionally, as a lawyer, or an accountant. They confer. He writes down results and consults again.

  Finally, he turns to me and says: “It has been decided.”

  “Decided?” I stammer.

  “You will be granted more time; we admit that some headway is finally being made. You are more than two-thirds of the way down the road. But remember that the Director needs to see the benchmarks hit: deliverables.”

  The parliament nods.

  “DELIVERABLES,” they intone in a chorus.

  The performance, the masque: it confuses me. And the phrase “doubly obscure” enters my head.

  “PROGRESS!” repeats the Director.

  “ACTIONABLE ITEMS,” the chorus chants.

  “I’ll do my best!” I cry.

  “You must do better! ALTERBURG!”

  “But sometimes, just sometimes, I can’t even recall what it is I—”

  “A novel. It is A NOVEL, Mr. Frobisher. Why are you being so terribly coy?”

  “What the actual fuck are you telling me.”

  “A novel. Obviously. You are writing one. Now get back to it.”

  And all of a sudden, a torrential slick of mud tsunamis out from a hole above me in the ceiling above my tub, drenching and blinding me. I am knocked back into my sarcophagus again, rocked by its force. I wheeze and gasp, attempting to breathe, struggling back up to the surface. Finally, I attain the air, and, with two last rude dollops, the cascade stops, and the aperture above me constricts, and I hook mud out of my mouth with a finger. I hear the Director’s voice again, but now cannot make out what he is saying.

  There is another bell.

  At once, my pink admin-and-guide is standing beside me. I am alone with him in the room once more. I look all around but there is no one else there.

  Cheap theater.

  Cheap theater.

  Alterburg.

  Doubly obscure.

  Cheap theater.

  * * *

  —

  And so I am led out again, along a rubberized floor to a stall where hoses are turned on me, I am rinsed with freezing mineral jets, until I can once again see my own flesh, my face flushed and wet (there’s a sepia-tinted veronica of it left upon my last towel), and I materialize from that stall newly christened, and I walk down a short path with handsome potted trees to a series of chaises, chairs which have almost mysterious properties I find difficult to analyze, it is perhaps the most comfortable I can ever remember being, spread out on these contraptions, camel-hair blankets placed upon us, the alpine air siphoned in, and I feel a species of postcoital ease, wherein the body has been recently exercised in pleasure and spent, and so I collapse in heaven among the other reincarnated fellows, holy, arisen, all of us, and after an hour of silent contemplation in which
I try and fail to make sense of this episode, a buzzer sounds, and the cycle concludes.

  36

  THE FUNDAMENTS OF MY PROJECT

  Fundament 14. Imagine the coming world.

  Fundament 15. I am “the Novelist.” (Apparently.)

  37

  (A WORD TOO MUCH)

  Waking Rn to my once-again-suspect device, which is playing a never-ending loop of “Thunder of the Great Cataracts.”

  “Zimzim: mute.”

  He does so, and I rise, donning my still-immaculate but now-perhaps-also-questionable uniform.

  (This “arising” is, in fact, an extremely complicated affair, as the effects which have taken hold of me since the infernal incident in the Pleasure Center’s general undergirding several weeks ago—“Walpurgis Nacht,” or “the Examination,” as I’d begun to think of it—show no signs of abating. Nervous apathy. A chemico-metallic taste in my mouth. A fearful tang.)

  Yet despite all of this, I’ve been wribbing. Writching. Writing. Writing.

  I’ve been writzing writing, see. Even as I lie abed. Scribble, scribble. I have been taking the Director and his unholy cohorts at their word. I am a novelist, evidently (despite evidence to the contrary). That is, I am actually writing a novel. I am being, to the best of my ability: “the Novelist.” (What else should I be doing, given the fact that the world is presenting paper to me in an unremitting torrent?)

  Writhing!

  In some very real sense, it is going quite well. The word count is mounting, the page count is mounting. However. I’ve noticed that my work is suffering from some sort of as-yet-unidentified infirmity. Something infecting it, I’m not sure what. A kind of confused quality (not to mention a secondhand and warmed-over one), such that I realize that much of what I have concocted here is destined for the garbage. So much of it is utter nonsense. I am new to this, after all, and there was bound to be a learning curve. Nevertheless, I am doing everything as I am supposed to in the hope that something good may eventually come of all this. Each day I compose myself at my desk, and, with a ready wit, reconfigured pen, scissors, tape, glue, my device, my printer, X-Acto knife, pencils, erasers, and an informed air, I begin to work. I make sentences. 1. Things-happening Sentences, 2. Observation Sentences, 3. Affectual Sentences, all of these joined up with 4. Glue Sentences, and there is even an ever-growing pile of 5. “Sentence” Sentences, which don’t refer anywhere except to themselves. Most of my sentences, though, take as their subject 6. Characters. Characters are the crucial compositional element here, and the foremost of my nouns. A resource not to be squandered. Characters are not really covered in my Fundaments, and I am really making it up as I go along here, though I have, already, gleaned a few basic rules of thumb. E.g., the number of characters in a project must be carefully regulated. There may only be so many, and so few. Also, a proper ratio of men to women, youngs to olds, principal characters to peripheral characters, etc. Also, characters should be of a “type.” I build these “type” characters using words chosen to illustrate the category of character I would like to evoke—for instance, an angry character of mine will display behaviors which are common indicators of anger: i. Red in the face, ii. Heavy breathing, iii. Raised voice, iv. Scowling, etc. (The admins enforced an exercise upon us just the other day in which we were taught to recognize precisely these very anger signs, asked to observe such behaviors in ourselves, and even encouraged to add some of our own descriptions to the general lists which are posted on a bulletin board in our Group meeting room.) Of course, not all characters are angry. Some are overly familiar, or sarcastic. Some are funny; some are warm. Some are flat and blank whereas others are fully formed. In any case, all of my characters are provided with behaviors of a varying degree of complexity, though all of them, at base, behave (in my wriping) the way that people are supposed to behave, not just in the mindspace, but more importantly, they behave the way Irl characters are supposed to behave in the meatspace. E.g., there are plenty of characters in my work who walk and laugh, and look and think and approach and depart, eat, smoke, so on, and when people talk to one another in my work they also do other things, simultaneously, like pick things up and put things down and shrug and sigh and whether this is how it’s done or not Idk but nevertheless all this behavior isn’t sufficient to make a character so information must be provided about the character’s past. That is, a character should have a history. The character’s true nature, the character’s motives, will be located in this historical background. Further to the idea of history, a character should be placed in encounters with the historical. Everything should take place in a particular moment. We learn about a character through this encounter with the particular moment, and we learn about the particular moment due to the character’s moving through it. So: a twofer. Also, Btw, a novel should have 7. Themes. Themes will come back, again and again throughout a novel (I’m told) like a refrain in a song. Though, NB, unlike a song, a novel should never communicate its refrains directly. A novel should beat around the bush whenever possible, allowing these lessons to emerge slowly, in the novel’s negative space as it were. It should never simply say such things outright. (To do this would be utterly cack-handed.) Anyway, back to characters. Always remember that the character is the subject of a novel, not the novelist. Characters in novels, as far as I can tell, seem to serve the quite specific purpose of blotting out the author. Not obliterating them, but, rather, distracting you from the fact that the novelist is still, always and forever, right there, next to you—boo—their hot, needy breath in your ear. The author’s omnipresence is disconcerting, so the more character is built up and put on display, the less one notices the author hovering around. Thus, characters are for misdirection and for forgetting. Characters, as I’ve mentioned, are made of sentences; specifically, characters are nouns, clothed in adjectives. But to become fully fledged characters, they must eventually, as all nouns must: verb. These verbing nouns are the motion of the text. Its direction and momentum. And direction-sentences, in particular, when taken as a whole, form the rudiments of 8. Plot. Plot is a big one, and I find it hard to see right now quite how my plot will ever truly gel. The construction of plot necessitates, as far as I can see: the author being capable of encompassing the entirety of a novel in his mind at once so that he may build up its architecture. The writer, like a god, observes a sum total. Only then can he turn a book this way and that, and make those very important decisions about narrative tension and release. It is worth noting that when an author gets too preoccupied with the “micro”—the particulars in front of him or her (for instance the nitty-gritty of his sentences)—while neglecting this all-important “macro” component of plot, things tend to bog down and become wordy and boring and the reader will soon wonder where the momentum of a particular novel has run off to, and all goodwill on behalf of the reader will just dissipate, etc. Psa, the novel will be articulated into smaller bits using certain tried-and-true, off-the-rack methods; for instance, the division of the novel into chapters, and the division of a group of chapters into parts (I, II, III, IV, so on). But even so, even using such ready-made tricks, I find conceiving of this complete novelistic gestalt incredibly difficult to accomplish, and that when I attempt the mental feat of holding the entirety of the book in my head, the end portion, specifically—the project’s denouement, its future—fades from view. The beginning is all clarity and confidence, sure. And even the middle of my novel is available to me (though it is blurring at the edges). The end though, the end…Anyway: plot. Language. Etc.