She’s still sleeping. Her body, her frozen little body, is wrapped in a sheet. Falling and diminishing. Ludovico has never entered a person other than through the holes made for it. He has never, ever, made new ones, not yet. Patience is among the finest of virtues, and good things come to those who wait.
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He cut the letters out of old magazines and sent her the letter. He doesn’t know whether she ever read it.
(I didn’t)
On the 6th of August 1991 at 16:00:12 GMT Tim Berners-Lee, an independent researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), made a short announcement in the Usenet newsgroup alt.hypertext about the World Wide Web (WWW) project. With this announcement the Web became a public service. The majority of modern historians (sic) set the date of the 6th of August 1991 as the beginning of a socio-geo-political-ideolusionary anomaly known as the Great Cacophony.
Some modern historians (sic) have reservations about that date and consider 1 January 1983 as the starting date of the Great Cacophony, when the TCP/IP protocol (the infrastructure of what would later be the web) replaced the NCP protocol and allowed for the combining of separate networks (ARPANET, NSFNET…) into a single global network: the internet.
Still other modern historians (sic) argue that the Great Cacophony began in Canada on 22 October 1925, when the Austro-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed a patent application for a transistor. Historians of this persuasion, who consider bare technological innovation as the sole driving force of history, then move the date down through the past – Charles Babbage, differential engine, in 1833; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a calculating machine based on the Staffelwalze (‘stepped drum’), 1672; Blaise Pascal, the Pascaline mechanical calculator, 1642, etc. etc. etc. all the way back to the Roman abacus, which was used by the Sumerians as early as 2400 BCE and which should therefore more aptly be called the Sumerian abacus.
Historians of yet another persuasion, for whom technological invention in and of itself represents nothing particularly earthshattering, demand in the leaps, twists and turns of history also the presence of human beings and their relationship with material, which incidentally pushes them into the area of metaphysics and the subjective position, which means that few serious people take them very seriously. These historians agree that the internet or the WWW represents a major shift in the area of human communication, but that the Great Cacophony cannot of course be placed so late in human history, and they prefer to locate its beginning in Gutenberg’s invention of the moveable-type printing press (1444) or in Cai Lun’s (Han dynasty) perfection of the papermaking process (c. 105 BCE) or even at the outset of writing itself (cuneiform, Mesopotamian Sumerians, c. 5300 BCE).
Modern historians (sic) of the fourth persuasion, whom nobody really considers to be historians at all and who themselves mostly prefer not to be thought of as historians, and who it would probably be better to call modern time-thinkers (as they themselves say, instead of the titles that others have hung on them – modern obscurantists, quasi-savants, esosophoterics), consider ‘the Great Cacophony’ to be a superfluous expression, a banal neologism for a concept that was developed long before the dawn of the third millennium by Édouard Le Roy, Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: the concept of the noosphere, the sphere of human thought that arose the moment homo sapiens first looked at a thing and said, this thing is, in addition to what it is, also a thing and by the grace of scientific classification transformed himself, poof!, from homo sapiens into homo sapiens sapiens, a modern, extra-aware human being.
Digression aside. The concept of the Great Cacophony, as the general public understands it and as a slightly tipsy father might describe it to his inquisitive five-year-old (‘Daddy, Daddy, what’s the Great Cacophony?’), is as follows: Son, you know, that was back when people constantly yapped and yapped away, and shouted over each other, louder and louder, so that in the end it was impossible to tell not just who was saying what to who, but even who it was that was yapping, and then the police no longer knew who was a bad guy and who was a good guy, and the soldiers no longer knew who was from our country and who wasn’t from our country, and nobody knew any more who they should listen to and what to do and everything was just completely messed up – it is a term for the two decades between 6 August 1991 and 17 December 2011, when the Great Cut occurred.
Carious cuttle.
‘Well, while we’re on the topic, can the Qur’an or any other holy book tell you what to do if you’ve got a brother who’s forever getting high on some unknown substance, and you don’t know how serious it all is, don’t even have the slightest clue whether it’s some ordinary passing phase, or whether the matter has an aspect that reaches into his very essence, and you don’t know how to approach it, what to say, who to say it to, how to help without him resenting you, because, hey, he looks completely normal, and when he disappears he always says he’s got a date with some babe, that he’s gonna stick it in her mouth, and when he returns his consonants are slurred, his smile is crooked, and you ask him if everything’s ok and he says, never better, never better, it’s just, and he looks left and right, I’m so tired, and he looks at you again, right in the eyes, his pupils look normal, and says, women tire you out, women, and you’re just waiting for it to be too late, for someone to stab him or for him to stab someone and end up in jail or a coffin, and everyone will say, well goodness, who would have thought? and you’ll have to bite your tongue? Do these holy books have an FAQ section? Do they have a detailed index? I mean, what do I care how I should behave towards slaves, and how I should kill time in a God-pleasing way out in the middle of the desert with my tribe, when I’m living in the wildest city in the world, where everybody’s emancipated and selfish and stoned to the stratosphere. The books should tell me something about orgies where some guy’s condom bursts, another guy’s arsehole gets ripped up, and a third guy just snaps and starts screaming and smashing everything in sight, and you’re sitting there in the living room and plugging your ears, does it tell you what you’re supposed to do? Call the police? Flee? Where to? Or do you just strip down and join the mass of bruises, your tongue hanging out, me too, me too? What should you think about the bullets that fly in the middle of the night and penetrate the wall an inch above your head? It seems to me all your books are completely irrelevant. I mean, I don’t know, I never read them. Maybe they’re good. Brother’s a dope fiend? Turn to page 250. People – beasts; read from start to finish. Fear of death…you know what, just show up at the mosque or the synagogue or whatever it is you have. Strawberries and peanuts, and shoes off. Is it ok to wear socks and sandals if I have to pop out for some bread? How can I quit smoking? Life gets more fucked up every year. But not in the depths, it’s fucked up on the surface. I already know how to listen to my heart, I don’t need books for that. I am, let’s say, fine. Totally fine. But, man, what the fuck is up with everybody else?’
He met Marjorie at the gym, during a morning workout a few hours ago. His body is pumped up with anabolic steroids. When Anwar introduced himself, he was quiet for a moment, then asked whether he was a Mohammedan (he used precisely that word), and responded to the nod (‘Bahá’í’, to be precise) by holding a monologue. His attitude towards religion is rather scornful. He lives with his brother, alone.
‘My faith doesn’t give me life instructions,’ says Anwar. ‘My faith is my cultural identity. With it, I am a better man. Once you’ve experienced the abyss, you appreciate such things. But your own cultural identity seems to me a little questionable, if you get so worked up over something like this.’
‘My…did you say my cultural identity?’
Anwar is completely at ease as he drives. Whenever he moves across the globe at a great speed, his feet ten inches above the ground and one foot pressed hard against the metal plate that separates him from it, he feels free. The
adrenaline that is rapidly being released into his fellow travellers’ blood-stream doesn’t bother him. He’s in a metal box, barely a part of this world.
‘Yes. Your cultural identity. People who are relaxed and present in the world, comfortably placed in the armour of identity, usually don’t complain about so-called holy books.’
‘Identity…armour…’
The two words are treacly and sticky in his mouth, like something that has been left forgotten in a drawer over the holidays and is now starting to stink even if the drawer is kept closed.
‘And holy books, it seems to me, whenever someone says ‘holy books’, they’re usually just thinking about the religious component of man and, even more generally, about their relationship to their own existence, that is, whether they can exist as that fictional concept we call man, accept themselves as they are, or whether they have to, in relation to themselves, always take a step back, endlessly receding in suspicion of whatever they see in the mirror.’
Zoja’s psychological make-up is an admixture of a primitive fear of speed and that slight intellectual buzzing triggered by the surprising disclosures of people who she had hitherto regarded as, shall we say, more unambiguous.
Marjorie looks out of the window at the ground, at the white lines painted on the asphalt that are gradually losing their character – their interruptions, their width, their variations of hue – and flowing into a beige-white line that curves inward.
Another monologue is in the works.
‘Cultural identity, you say. Man as a fictional concept even. I find that offensive. Simply offensive. My mother was born in Nieuw Rotterdam, my father in San-Seoul. Even when I try my very best, I cannot fathom why they decided to have children. I could understand if there was only one, my brother, an accident, premature passion and contraceptive failure, one you can handle, stick him somewhere and leave him in peace, so you can scatter your life at will, no problem, but, two kids – do you follow? – that is, either you are totally thick and you simply can’t understand your body, it’s not clear to you that if you don’t know how to keep your pants on, if you stick your pubic unit into someone else’s pubic unit, that a whole new consciousness will have to explain the situation to itself, in its own way, and that it would probably be easier for everyone if this consciousness didn’t exist, and when that happens to you, watch out, the second time and you’re still sitting on the chair and looking at your penis, and you look, now, at two pairs of protruding eyes and on the other side there’s her, also staring between her legs from which now a second watermelon has already crawled out, and it’s still not clear to you that some things simply shouldn’t be stuffed together; or you’re a malicious toad that intentionally rubs its head over a box of matches so that, for a moment, it can smell the sulphur, before throwing the burnt matchstick away… I don’t know why I’m saying this. There was no fiction. Just stupid flesh, you understand? Some people are born to morons. The nearest they come to any sort of guidance is a hysterical slap or absolute denial that they exist as a complex thing, and the only culture in the household is represented by the mouldy yoghurt that has been left in the fridge for a few months. We got nothing, my brother and I. Our parents were too poor to buy us off with mass culture and too stupid to think of anything else. Dad spent his time getting caught up in the dumbest of money-making ventures, pyramid schemes, selling things door-to-door, he was a complete incompetent, Mum was a cleaning lady, and we kids were abandoned to chance until both of them got hit by a train, their legs got cut off, so now they’re happily imitating the other vegetables at some home for the disabled and imagining they’re still part of this world just because they, somewhere, sometime, somehow left behind a pair of brats. Back then I was twelve and he was seventeen. I have no clue how we ended up here. But what I wanted to say is that I find you offensive, all of you heirs of the prophets, because you picked some tolerable figure from the confusions of time and laid that cross, ha ha, over the holes that living people left you with. You don’t have the right to a fictitious identity! You’re all lonely, contradictory, desperate creatures, with sand in your hands and up to your ankles in water, drawing strength from fairy tales, fables that let you look down on your fellow men. That’s what I think about the whole thing.’
Anwar is concentrating on the road. The traffic is getting heavier and at this speed you have to anticipate, have to be vigilant. Even within the framework of traffic regulations anomalies occur – drunk drivers, coach-driving Amish, weak-sighted old people, an impulsive manoeuvre. Driving is a demanding operation. Time passes at two levels (inside and outside the vehicle), in two sets of chaotic interactions (in the brain and in the traffic) and with rapidly shifting instincts and intentions, both in the individual and in the system.
Zoja looks at the back seats. Marjorie looks sour. He is rhapsodically sincere.
‘Would you rather see,’ she asks, ‘everyone immersed in their own imperfection? Humanity as a long procession of mourning ruins? Isn’t an intervention into reality possible also from a position of brokenness? The way I see it, everything’s a projection. You see yourself torn, along with the uniform. You could simply change perspective. Say that identity is a leaking ship and the person, through intervention, is the vehicle of coherence. You just have to permit yourself to intervene. Then it doesn’t matter whether or not you’re dispersed.’
‘Action will not make my life whole.’
‘It depends on the type of action.’
A tyre bursts. Anwar responds to this with cold precision. He has anticipated this possibility, been preparing for it, and has maybe, by having concentrated on the fact that something of that sort can occur, even caused it (for years after one consumes, cause and effect are on shaky ground). He turns the steering wheel, indicates right, is attentive to all the mirrors at once and safely steers among the honking lorries and the nearly murdered motorcyclist onto the hard shoulder.
‘Do you know any voodoo?’
Dolores gets up. Her lipstick is smeared all over her face. She looks like a mime who has just sweated through a marathon routine. She has an inside-out stocking over her hair. Her wig is lying on the floor, looking like a run-over cat. Ludovico uses a toe to retrieve it and fling it in the air. He catches it, sticks his finger in the scalp and twirls it around.
‘Give it to me, sweetie, can’t you see what a mess I look?’
‘You are what you are, what can you do? Just tell me if you know some voodoo magic.’
Her legs are sloppily shaved, there are thick crops of hair at random places. She’s in a thong, bent over sideways, tucking her member under the material with her fingers. She pulls a skirt over her bottom and looks around for her shoes. Her breasts are small, artificial, and one is lower than the other. Her nipples look like a drunk’s skewed eyes.
‘Why would I know voodoo, sweetie?’
Her chocolate skin is dappled with white spots reminiscent of some sort of disease.
‘Aren’t you from the Caribbean or Jamaica or someplace where there are magicians?’
Her incisors are so wide apart that you could wag your finger between them.
‘Is that supposed to be some sort of insult? I’m from Haiti. We’ve forgotten our voodoo. Too many missionaries met with too much success. But I can eat you whole, human flesh still tastes good.’
‘I saw how starved you were before, yeah.’
Whenever she laughs spontaneously it comes out inconsistently deep.
‘Will you make me dinner, or will you be a bastard and toss me out?’
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
She does up her bra and slips into a blue shirt.
‘On whether or not you enchant me.’
‘I don’t know how to.’
‘Collective memory in the hypothalamus. If your great-grandparents knew it, so do you, you just have to remember.’
‘I have no idea what you just said. Give me back my wig.’
She walks towards
him, in an obscenely knock-kneed walk.
‘Enchant me.’
‘Ludy, my magic ends when I wake up.’
‘I want a voodoo spell!’ shouts Ludovico. Dolores shudders. For a moment fear flashes in her eyes.
‘All right, all right, come here.’
Ludovico moves to the edge of the bed. Dolores sits next to him and reaches down to his fly.
‘Not like that. Don’t you fucking know what voodoo is?’
‘Ludy, I don’t understand.’
‘Blood and sacrifice and black magic, not a blow job.’
‘But we don’t have any blood,’ says Dolores.
‘Enchant me.’
‘Give me back my wig.’
‘No.’
‘I can’t do magic without my wig.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Dolores smiles and rolls her eyes. She looks past Ludovico’s head, a bewildered expression on her face, it’s a neat little trick that works on the street whenever a guy has a fistful of money but is dithering over whether or not to pay. Ludovico turns and Dolores quickly grabs for the wig. He’s faster than her, almost unbelievably fast. He puts the wig out of her reach, grabs her extended arm and twists it behind her back, roughly, painfully. Dolores yelps in fear. Ludovico pulls her close and whispers in her ear.
‘If you won’t do it yourself, I’ll teach you…magic.’
He drags her backwards into the kitchen, slowly they waddle, her arse rubs against his crotch with each step, making him hard. Dolores yelps.
In the kitchen he pushes her up against the counter.
‘Give me your hand.’
‘Ludy, what the hell are you doing. Let me go, Ludy, you know they know I’m with you, they’ll come looking for me, you know they will, Ludy, dammit…’
He slams her head against the edge of the cupboard.
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