Same Same

by Peter Mendelsund

  It feels like a rite. A celebratory ritual, perhaps.

  And there is much to celebrate: I am out of administrative segregation and back among a better class of people here, a better class of artist, back in my old Group. The admin reads the roll off of her device. We grunt when our names are called. Here, yup, yes. All present. We are all here. And we hear, from outside, the rattling of the dome. The room sways slightly.

  Unfold the chairs. The men sit wide, elbows on legs. Heads bowed. The women cross and uncross their legs nervously. Someone rapidly whisks something off their shoulder. Someone else coughs. Admin11 calls us to order.

  Today’s participants: Mathematician, Puppeteer, Astronomer, Painter, Set Theorist, Composer, a bunch of newly inducted fellows I don’t recognize, and me (obvs).

  The Painter goes first and tells us that he is a highly respected and well-paid society portraitist (“I’ve seen your work,” I say, but am hissed down by the mob. Don’t interrupt.). Actually, he was a highly respected and well-paid society portraitist…until…until each painting of each distinct patron slowly, almost imperceptibly, sitting by sitting, began to ressemble a painting of the Painter himself; the sitter’s features dilating or contracting to mimic his own morphology, their genders, ages, ethnicities erased and overwritten…Okay. Well. Yup. His portraits all became self-portraits…Aw fuck it, fuck it…followed by the Composer, whose massive fugues set new standards for contrapuntal complexity; so impeccable were his works of species counterpoint that his colleagues folded up their books of staff paper, broke their quills, abandoned their organ lofts, and shunted their clavichords down to basements under old blankets, yet, yet, the Composer is still reaching for new heights and keeps adding more and more chromatically difficult counter-subjects to his compositions, but always (again, of course!) ending up, ending up with the same final theme, the only theme which can function in his clockwork musical puzzles as an ultimate motif, the only one which works against the inevitable movements of all the other parts—over and over again, that theme being the notes which spell the letters in his own fucking name…ugh…then, then, then, the Mathematician who keeps finding paradoxical self-evidence (sigh) in all of his closed systems…shit…and the Puppeteer who keeps making little puppeteers, who make smaller puppeteers, in dangling-down family-tree-like skeins, cladistics of fraying tapestries in ever-increasing fractal self-similarity and inbred corruption…and a certain man who rewrites another man’s book, line by line, word by word, thereby imbuing the old text with an entirely new set of meanings not contained in the original, we already know this one don’t we…uh…etc., etc. and suchlike, so on, but then here’s the Set Theorist whose set of all sets that do not contain themselves drives him around the bend and, and, and the Astronomer who sees nothing but the glint from his own eye reflected in his telescopes, and the Philosopher who only believes in the surety of analytic propositions—propositions which take the form of tautologies, and the Neuroscientist who tweaks his own angular gyrus in order to record a series of dissociative OBEs, all of which contain (sigh) himself, and every difference everywhere is only one of scale, if even that, suchlike; and then it’s my turn, and so I begin, but, in the middle, in the middle of what (I should add) has become an increasingly triumphant account of my project, of my various moves up the Ladder, of my victory, I have a memory—bright and stark. It arrives obvious as could be, as if it had stridden in during visitation hours on a predetermined day, stomped through the main glass doors of my conscious mind and signed the registry at its front desk; ding ding ding. And stood before me in all of its simultaneously accusatory and frightened facticity. This memory which will be the beginning of my story.

  A memory of my trip here. My trip to the Freehold. To the Institute. (Listen, it is plain as day.) A single lurch forward, and I was gone. Flight. A gap. Then: the desert as I first saw it, that is, from the airplane. No, earlier. A monitor on the seat back in front of me. There was an icon: a miniature white cross, trailing a red dotted line behind it like spoor, that’s us; our path growing imperceptibly longer and longer, the plane set against a sea of desaturated blue, entering and despoiling it; we are turned at an impossible angle as if flying sideways, plowing toward a promised-land green—which wouldn’t be green of course, but tan and brown and also blisteringly, ascendantly white; but there, then, on board the plane, it was green, an impossibly beautiful, transcendental green; the green of aspiration, and fecund possibility—an LCD world. 7,000 miles. 6,999 miles…the roar like a silence.

  6,998; 6,997…This memory one step more toward the source. Backward I mean. Idk. Crucial info, though, Imo.

  Leaving the Group and the complex and heading out onto the sandstorm-wavering, darkened, and polluted grounds, I think: though we departed from our own, disparate homes, we all saw the same seat backs; were all represented, somewhere on that screen, buried deep in the pixels of that map, in that white cross, flying, flying over the blue ocean toward the falsely green land? We all flew into the same hub here, didn’t we; were all driven along the same endless roads. We suffered the same thirsts, hungers, disorientations. All of us, perhaps, even sharing the same affliction: that need to make; to create and perfect our idiolects. I feel now, a true member of the community, and wish to play my part here. There is so much to share, so much I can contribute.

  “You will see, Percy. It all seems strange at first, but, when the coin drops, it can feel like an awakening.” This is what Miss Fairfax had said, and I had scoffed at the idea. But just look at me now.

  It is a free period, and everyone is emerging from the buildings at once, some chatting, some lighting cigarettes, others clutching notebooks and other project-work, in twos and threes, a group of ten, and some solitaries, all in their uniforms, their beautiful, if ragged, uniforms. Where is Ousman Al’Hatif? Gone already? I look for his beard, his tam, his scarf. Not here.

  I go to his little room—there is, now, just a sad, stripped single bed, his drawers are pulled and void, and in the brown and dingy bathroom there isn’t even a toothbrush; all traces of him stripped, not a thing left, except wait—I see now that here are a couple of his photos, from his home maybe, still sticky-tacked up there on the far wall. His family—two Al’Hatif parents and an Al’Hatif son—and a desert, and a souk, and a city, a postcard of a statue, camels. He must have forgotten to take them, so maybe he will come back for these personal effects, though somehow, I now doubt this, and look, there is a single red checker on the floor right there in the corner by the bed. I leave the residence, and head out into the garden again, and where is Dennis—oh right, Mr. Royal has left too. They’d be the ones; my friends and confidants. Have you seen Miss ☺ the Brand Analyst? I ask a group of fellows, promenading arm-in-arm out of the Science structure. “Who?” Never mind. No worries. I have to…Hey, hey; excuse me! Do you know where the Philosopher might be…I’m sorry I don’t understand. Where the hell are all…Pardon? So sorry, but I’m looking for 鼎福 the Architect…

  I can’t find anyone I recognize. Where is? Where, where…is…gone, gone.

  Gone.

  My clique. My tribe. Everyone: elsewhere.

  Charlotte Chatterton, my Mysterious Woman. She, at least, is still haunting her usual spots…

  I bustle over to the glacial lake—now a decidedly unglacial landfill. It smells to high hell. A pulpy morass of sodden shit.

  Circumnavigating its perimeter until I reach her bench outside of the Mountain House, the spot where I saw her from the car, reading, all of those (I want to say: six years?) ago. And it is empty.

  What now? Achy disappointment. I plop down.

  The bell is ringing—faint as it is from out here—ringing for another Accessional Moment. Soon, everyone will be back indoors. If it were another day, an earlier day, I’d be scrambling toward my flat, hustling to make some progress. Up the Ladder. Up and up. Instead, I sit here quietly, observing the ghos
t town, the gray structures, the kaleidoscopic metastructure, the clogged allée, the Institute’s cooling, wasting body, listen to the hiccuping breezes from the malfunctioning turbines as they disturb the papers with their last, choking gasps, rustling them like grasses on a savannah. What now? I idly tug a single sheet up from under my resting thigh, and examine it. There is writing on it which I can’t read so I snatch another sheet, its neighbor:

  An unassuming young man was traveling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks’ visit.

  I pull up a handful of the sheets now, some pristine, others crumpled into balls, or folded, sometimes haphazardly, other times conscientiously according to principles understandable (paper airplane, tricorn hat, lady’s fan) or not (arcane origamis).

  I unrumple them and read. One says:

  They have been called up, these comrades here, for a final push in a battle that has lasted all day…

  A war narrative of some stripe.

  As opposed to the next sheet, which, though it is numbered at the bottom, is otherwise blank…

  And another paper, from a small pad perhaps, which bears at its top, like a letterhead, a picture of a tree. A palm? Linden? Or a ladder? Flagpole? Two snakes slithering up it, the structure ending unnaturally in a pair of brazen wings, spread confidently broad, as if the whole nightmarish, chimerical contraption could rise up, an unholy airscrew in a fever-dream of flight. Crumple, jettison. More pages. Written in German, French, a tale of illness, racking coughs, blue bottles of sputum, thermometers, straight razors, an argument, a duel, a phonograph, a suicide, a Tatar beauty, a sharp-nailed, malarial superman who is unable to finish a sentence, his wordless manservant, a doomed young Samaritan, a grieving mother, a rationalist, a Jesuit, a blustering director, a soldier’s duty, a love unrequited, requited, then unrequited again, then dropped entirely, discontent, philosophy, lectures, hikes, alpine fevers…a spiritualist too, and a ghost. And look who is coming toward me now, but the Medium herself—the Institute’s youngest, most precocious talent—a fellow with a knack for showing up late, at the eleventh hour, in order to disrupt the proceedings with unwelcome clairvoyance. She always promises a little final-inning drama. Her mysterious, occult powers crackling about her, a visible nimbus of ectoplasm, her glazed eyes in constant intercourse with the beyond, and at this moment she is sleepwalking toward me, holding out a new sheet of paper.

  But, but, but oh boy, look at this, will you.

  Just look at this one…

  (THE PAPER CONTINUED)

  One lurch forward and, and we were gone.

  The highway runs straight through deciduous northern forests. Isolation is part of the promise and the cure. I have a single, faxed sheet with the intake info on my lap. There’s a map and a schedule and a picture of some of the employees smiling. The car’s otherworldly chill.

  I spend the night in a motel. A no-place. There is nothing around it. I stare at myself in the mirror in the morning for some time.

  It’s leaden out this morning, dark, but the drugstore glasses stay on. Step away, they say, by reflecting you back at yourself.

  I go through small industrial towns on their last legs. Passing through streets, ramps, ramparts, overpasses, roundabouts, convergences, and divergences. The fog of transit. Gone through green. A roadside green. The green of dying. On and on. Everything proceeding along a line, spooling out more and more, trees now broken by off-ramps and shopping centers and weigh stations, everything wiped, smudged along at a single speed. This maintaining. This attempt at maintaining continuity. This, despite so many new surroundings, one after another, which cumulatively threaten to unhinge and dismantle the calm. And now I’m sleeping. And waking and sleeping again. And then my body, alert to new forms of motion as the car slows and stops. The car only speaks the language of motion and it is saying that we are getting closer, and closer still, and the car is saying all of this to me through relative speed.

  Slowing. Going again. And slows and stops again, and accelerates again, so on, which must mean smaller towns, smaller roads, smaller and smaller roads. And then I sit up. Sad exurban ghettos now. The row houses, the clone houses, overlooking the highway’s ravines whiz by, though I inhabit them mentally—their vinyl siding, drab stucco and brickface, linoleum, blowcrete, wood-paneled grimness—I live in them for just long enough to smudge the passage of time. “Bear right in five hundred feet onto Interstate Twenty-three.” Corporate parks, no-man’s lands, depots. Piles of gravel. These derelict gas stations. That scrub and waste. Occasional tracks and platforms. This blank passage. Once-Drive-In-Movie-Plazas now unofficial parking lots, stubbled with broken speaker stands. These shoulders, embankments, culverts, off-ramps; rest stops gone to despair. Industrial structures webbed by power lines. Factory chimneys: those sad sentinels. Marsh reeds; roadkill. Rail yards—railway trestles; lines of cars, obsolete for passengers, but a brute force method for transporting what? Solvents, plastics, wood gums, pesticides, industrial resins, potassium chloride, polyvinyl chlorides, polypropylene, polyethylene, sarin, mustard gas, cyanide…production lines of oversized capsules, mobile Bhopals poised to move these varieties of fatal medicine to a world always-already laid waste. This thin, crepuscular light which reveals geometries hidden in the facades. Dandelion is here; crabgrass. Wrappers and remnants; rags, cans, frayed tires, rotted food, sloughed-off mufflers. Flashing constellations of obliterated glass. A latex glove. Whose? This grime. This rot and ruin. This roadside garbage. Our common debris. “In two miles, take a right onto Exit Fifteen.”

  Later, a thought: Doesn’t every trip undertaken alone bear a trace or foreshadow of that other trip necessarily undertaken alone? Shut up. Shut up. I see a water tower off in the distance, a fixed point to focus on. In the foreground, though still far off, are power lines, attached to huge stanchions. I watch the alien and bulbous water tower move slowly through the power lines like a series of whole notes through a grand staff. The triangulation of our car and the two large objects far off awakens something in me, deep in me, though I am not at all sure what. And then the forest scrim overtakes the scene.

  The landscape tilts back now, and our car reclines into higher precincts. The air, a bit colder. “In one point five miles, turn left.” We’ve entered the near country, the dingy foothills. Through fogs and rains, and hail the size and shape of pencil erasers. Cold winds. The various slow-motion undersea sloshings of the maples and elms in the wind, the anxious shiver of asters, fewer and fewer cars, box stores, “no hunting,” then we are going up farther, and there is a ridge of sorts, which we follow. When I first see it I think “What a grubby little mountain,” as it’s pathetic really. But I guess it is as near to a peak as we get out here, and at least there’s a view, though not of much, and then a bit farther on still and then I see a gate right at the hollow of the mountain’s throat, and then here now is a small chain-link fence, and the roundabout, and then the sign, the sign reading “The Alterberg Institute,” and then onto another gentle upward, and then a subtle leveling-out which leads to another roundabout, the perfect little lawns of hell, the hedgerows of Hades (smelling no longer of citrus but loamy with mud and dead leaves, nettles and burdock, dog excrement), and oh ye gods the facade, the white glazed bricks, the bricks, the horrible white bricks, the building blocks which make the world a toilet. And then the little sculpture, please no, that perfect, plaster, vaginal hood with the pale blue Virgin’s dumb, grinning head at perfect clitoral height, hands outspread to admit, to admit all of us, willing or no, and subsequently the little windows, the dark mullions, the shitty little concrete sidewalk, weeds pushing up, escaping like errant pubes, the scratched revolving glass doors, the sound of gravel under the tires, “You have reached your destination,” stopping, catch of latch, clunk of trunk, and, the lobby, the smell, of petroleum, talc, wintergreen, B.O., antiseptic, the admittance, the desk,
the scattered, dead-eyed loiterers, those scaries, those saddies, those wounded, the…and the…fucking untold. Sorrow of it all. The fathomless lonesomeness, the why, and the oh, and…I don’t think…really? And…It was the best of times it was the worst of families is unhappy in its own truth universally acknowledged that a single Ishmael is a hot weary dead man a wicked man exiled by fate in long longtemps ago maman est morte also father died last year just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except it had something to do with the heat closing in on the dotted line but in my arms and the child he is pale and thin he wears a miserably weary world as he stood on his balcony gorging himself in the correction of the correction of the correction of gloom no love was left all earth and that was bottomless perdition there to dwell in the present tense though he may use the past because a passive voice depends directly upon the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling for the straightforward path had been lost in that place whose name I do not care to remember that someone must have by a vicus of recirculation led us borne back ceaselessly to the lower frequencies on which I speak for you as his soul swooned slowly spoke aloud to the large crowd of spectators the day of my execution now everybody along a way a lone a last a loved along the ecstasy of extreme fatigue which I have borne what no man the fallen wonder one of the best of its kind I ever lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs so all things limp together for the only possible