The Nightmare Factory (78 page)

Nevertheless, he was forced by his guardians to lie upon this coarse slab and be fettered by straps so decayed that he could easily tear them off. But the stern auxiliaries did not seem to be aware of the true condition of things: they continued to perform routine tasks that once may have had a purpose before being eclipsed by changes unknown to them.

Through the brittle haze of that room he watched his keepers as they went about some dutiful business, picking up obscure debris lying about the table, remnants of an undertaking long abandoned, or one no longer practiced in the same manner. This material they deposited in a large chest and locked it within. Then, with the studied automatism of pallbearers, they lifted the chest by its handles and carried it away, descending the stairs at the center of the room, their heavy feet scuffing the steps of that great prison tower. And echoes diminished in the depths below.

With the labored movements of a sleeper prematurely awakened, he turned himself from the table. And it was then he saw that the room was provided with a window, a single opening without glass. But so filled was this aperture with the blackness beyond that it seemed to be only a shadow painted upon the wall. He stepped slowly about the mounds of paper and other waste lying about the floor, careful of the deceptions of the room’s fractured light, and leaned over the window’s ledge. Far below he could see two tiny figures with a miniature box bobbing between them. They shrank farther into the quiet distance and finally disappeared into one of those dark hulking structures which were crowded together along narrow streets. So alike were these buildings that he could not keep his fix on the one they had entered, though he had his suspicions. Remaining at the window, he gazed into the great blackness above, which seemed to exert a strange magnetism, a tugging at the tower that rose so near to this mute and lightless firmament. After a few moments he turned away from the window. Now he was alone, with nothing to hold him to that place.

But as he moved toward the stairs to leave, he paused and scrutinized the piles of disjecta about him. Among this scattering of odds and ends there appeared to be something like bones or pieces of bones, broken leavings of some enterprise that had taken place here. And there was also such an abundance of jettisoned paper, pages dark with scribbling and sloughed off in the chaos of composition. Yet as he studied with greater intentness this mass of wild marks, he began to receive a few splinters of its theme, to read the wreckage of an unknown adventure. He seemed to see phrases, incantations, formulae, and almost to hear them spoken by a shattered voice.
The pact of bones and blackness
, the voice declaimed to him.
The collection of shadows…shadows binding bones…skeletons becoming shadows.
And he came to understand other things:
the land stripped of flesh…the reeking earth ripped clean and rising into the great blackness.
This reverberant discourse had made him its student, imparting theories and practice:
bones pummeled into purity…parts turned to brilliant particles…the shadows seeded with the voice of skulls…the many voices within eternal blackness…the tenebrous harmony.

At last he turned his eyes from these words that were not words. Trying to draw away from them, he stumbled toward the stairs. But the voice which spoke these things continued to speak to him. It then became many voices speaking. Things had already begun to change. And now the stairs descended only into blackness, a blackness that was rising into the room as a great shadow around him. Shadows and their blackness and the voices they possessed. The one who had dreamed of bones and shadows—bones and shadows together—spoke in these voices and knew the name to speak, the name that would flay the flesh, the true name that called its bearer into the shadows as folds of blackness fell upon him and wrapped him in their shroud.

Now they had summoned him, now he was with them. Things had changed yet everything continued as before. And he cried out as the shadow sought his bones and as he felt his bones reaching into the blackness. Yet it was no longer his own voice that sounded in the tower, but the echoing clamor of strange shrieking multitudes.

PART 4
Teatro Grottesco and Other Tales

TEATRO GROTTESCO

^T
he first thing I learned was that no one
anticipates
the arrival of the Teatro. One would not say, or even think, “The Teatro has never come to this city—it seems we’re due for a visit,” or perhaps, “Don’t be surprised when you-know-what turns up, it’s been years since the last time.” Even if the city in which one lives is exactly the kind of place favored by the Teatro, there can be no basis for predicting its appearance. No warnings are given, no fanfare to announce that a Teatro season is about to begin, or that
another
season of that sort will soon be upon us. But if a particular city possesses what is sometimes called an “artistic underworld,” and if one is in close touch with this society of artists, the chances are optimal for being among those who discover that things have already started. This is the most one can expect.

For a time it was all rumors and lore, hearsay and dreams. Anyone who failed to show up for a few days at the usual club or bookstore or special artistic event was the subject of speculation. But most of the crowd I am referring to lead highly unstable, even precarious lives. Any of them might pack up and disappear without notifying a single soul. And almost all of the supposedly “missing ones” were, at some point, seen again. One such person was a filmmaker whose short movie
Private Hell
served as the featured subject of a local one-night festival. But he was nowhere to be seen either during the exhibition or at the party afterwards. “Gone with the Teatro,” someone said with a blasé knowingness, while others smiled and clinked glasses in a sardonic farewell toast.

But only a week later the filmmaker was spotted in one of the back rows of a pornographic theater. He later explained his absence by insisting he had been in the hospital following a thorough beating at the hands of some people he had been filming but who did not consent or desire to be filmed. This sounded plausible, given the subject matter of the man’s work. Yet for some reason no one believed his hospital story, despite the evidence of bandages he was still required to wear. “It has to be the Teatro,” argued a woman who always dressed in shades of purple and who was a good friend of the filmmaker. “
His
stuff and
Teatro
stuff,” she said, holding up two crossed fingers for everyone to see.

But what was meant by “Teatro stuff?” This was a phrase I heard spoken by a number of persons, not all of them artists of a pretentious or self-dramatizing type. Certainly there is no shortage of anecdotes that have been passed around which purport to illuminate the nature and workings of this “cruel troupe,” an epithet used by those who are too superstitious to invoke the Teatro Grottesco by name. But sorting out these accounts into a coherent
profile
, never mind their truth value, is another thing altogether.

For instance, the purple woman I mentioned earlier held us all spellbound one evening with a story about her cousin’s roommate, a self-styled “visceral artist” who worked the night shift as a stock clerk for a supermarket chain in the suburbs. On a December morning, about an hour before sun-up, the artist was released from work and began his walk home through a narrow alley that ran behind several blocks of various stores and businesses along the suburb’s main avenue. A light snow had fallen during the night, settling evenly upon the pavement of the alley and glowing in the light of a full moon which seemed to hover just at the alley’s end. The artist saw a figure in the distance, and something about this figure, this winter-morning vision, made him pause for a moment and stare. Although he had a trained eye for sizing and perspective, the artist found this silhouette of a person in the distance of the alley intensely problematic. He could not tell if it was short or tall, or even if it was moving—either toward him or away from him—or was standing still. Then, in a moment of hallucinated wonder, the figure stood before him in the middle of the alley.

The moonlight illuminated a little man who was entirely unclothed and who held out both of his hands as if he were grasping at a desired object just out of his reach. But the artist saw that something was wrong with these hands. While the little man’s body was pale, his hands were dark and were too large for the tiny arms on which they hung. At first the artist believed the little man to be wearing oversized mittens. His hands seemed to be covered by some kind of fuzz, just as the alley in which he stood was layered with the fuzziness of the snow that had fallen during the night. His hands looked soft and fuzzy like the snow, except that the snow was white and his hands were black.

In the moonlight the artist came to see that the mittens worn by this little man were actually something like the paws of an animal. It almost made sense to the artist to have thought that the little man’s hands were actually paws which had only appeared to be two black mittens. Then each of the paws separated into long thin fingers that wriggled wildly in the moonlight. But they could not have been the fingers of a hand, because there were too many of them. And the hands were not paws, nor were the paws really mittens. And all of this time the little man was becoming smaller and smaller in the moonlight of that alley, as if he were moving into the distance far away from the artist who was hypnotized by this vision. Finally a little voice spoke which the artist could barely hear, and it said to him: “I cannot keep them away from me anymore, I am becoming so small and weak.” These words suddenly made this whole winter-morning scenario into something that was too much even for the self-styled “visceral artist.”

In the pocket of his coat the artist had a tool which he used for cutting open boxes at the supermarket. He had cut into flesh in the past, and, with the moonlight glaring upon the snow of that alley, the artist made a few strokes which turned that white world red. Under the circumstances what he had done seemed perfectly justified to the artist, even an act of mercy. The man was becoming so small.

Afterward the artist ran through the alley without stopping until he reached the rented house where he lived with his roommate. It was she who telephoned the police, saying there was a body lying in the snow at such and such a place and then hanging up without giving her name. For days, weeks, the artist and his roommate searched the local newspapers for some word of the extraordinary thing the police must have found in that alley. But nothing ever appeared.

“You see how these incidents are hushed up,” the purple woman whispered to us. “The police know what is going on. There are even
special police
for dealing with such matters. But nothing is made public, no one is questioned. And yet, after that morning in the alley, my cousin and her roommate came under surveillance and were followed everywhere by unmarked cars. Because these special policemen know that it is artists, or highly artistic persons, who are
approached
by the Teatro. And they know whom to watch after something has happened. It is said that these police may be party to the deeds of that ‘company of nightmares’.”

But none of us believed a word of this Teatro anecdote told by the purple woman, just as none of us believed the purple woman’s friend, the filmmaker, when he denied all innuendos that connected him to the Teatro. On the one hand, our imaginations had sided with this woman when she asserted that her friend, the creator of the short movie
Private Hell
, was somehow in league with the Teatro; on the other hand, we were mockingly dubious of the story about her cousin’s roommate, the self-styled visceral artist, and his encounter in the snow-covered alley.

This divided reaction was not as natural as it seemed. Never mind that the case of the filmmaker was more credible than that of the visceral artist, if only because the first story was lacking the extravagant details which burdened the second. Until then we had uncritically relished all we had heard about the Teatro, no matter how bizarre these accounts may have been and no matter how much they opposed a verifiable truth or even a coherent portrayal of this phenomenon. As artists we suspected that it was in our interest to have our heads filled with all kinds of Teatro craziness. Even I, a writer of nihilistic prose works, savored the inconsistency and the flamboyant absurdity of what was told to me across a table in a quiet library or a noisy club. In a word, I delighted in the
unreality
of the Teatro stories. The truth they carried, if any, was immaterial. And we never questioned any of them until the purple woman related the episode of the visceral artist and the small man in the alley.

But this new disbelief was not in the least inspired by our sense of reason or reality. It was in fact based solely on fear; it was driven by the will to negate what one fears. No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal. In some way all of this Teatro business had finally worn upon our nerves; the balance had been tipped between a madness that intoxicated us and one that began to menace our minds. As for the woman who always dressed herself in shades of purple…we avoided her. It would have been typical of the Teatro, someone said, to use a person like that for their purposes.

Perhaps our judgment of the purple woman was unfair. No doubt her theories concerning the “approach of the Teatro” made us all uneasy. But was this reason enough to cast her out from that artistic underworld which was the only society available to her? Like many societies, of course, ours was founded on fearful superstition, and this is always reason enough for any kind of behavior. She had been permanently stigmatized by too closely associating herself with something unclean in its essence. Because even after her theories were discredited by a newly circulated Teatro tale, her status did not improve.