The Nightmare Factory (82 page)

My suspicions of the others’ deception—perhaps it might be called a
tentative
deception—derived from a source that was admittedly subjective. This was my imaginative recreation, as I sat in my apartment, of the spectacle of Severini as it was related to me by those who had participated in the visits to his residence in the marsh. In my mind I pictured them seated upon the floor of that small, unfurnished shack, the only illumination being the hectic light of candles that they brought with them and placed in a circle, at the center of which was the figure of Severini. This figure always spoke to them in his uniquely cryptic way, his sleeptalking voice fluctuating in its qualities and even seeming to emanate from places other than his own body, as though he were practicing a hyper-ventriloquism. Similarly, his body itself, as I was told and as I later imagined to myself in my apartment, appeared to react in concert with the fluctuations in his voice. These bodily changes, the others said, were sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic, but they were consistently ill-defined—not a matter of clear transformation as much as a
breakdown
of anatomical features and structures, the result being something twisted and tumorous like a living mound of diseased clay or mud, a heap of cancerous matter that slowly thrashed about in the candlelight which illuminated the old shack. These fluctuations in both Severini’s voice and his body, the others explained to me, were not in any way under his own guidance but were a totally spontaneous phenomenon to which he submitted as the result of the esoteric procedure or illicit practice worked upon him in some unknown place (possibly “in the region of the Philippines”). It was now his destiny, the others elaborated, to comply with whatever was demanded of his flesh by what could only be seen as utterly mindless and chaotic forces, and even his consciousness itself—they asserted—was as deranged and mutable as his bodily form. Yet as they spoke to me about these particulars of Severini’s condition, none of them conveyed any real sense of the nightmarish quality of the images and processes they were describing. Awestruck, yes; passionate, yes; somewhat demented, yes. But nightmarish—no. Even as I listened to their account of a given Severini meeting, I too failed to grasp fully their nightmarish qualities and aspects. They would say to me, referring to one of Severini’s metamorphoses, “The naked contours of his form twisted about like a pool of snakes, or twitched like a mass of newly hatched spiderlings.” Nevertheless, upon hearing statement after statement of this kind I sat relatively undisturbed, accepting without revulsion or outrage these revolting and outrageous remarks. Perhaps, I thought at the time, I was simply under the powerful spell of social decorum, which so often may explain otherwise incomprehensible feelings (or lack of feelings) and behaviors (or lack of behaviors). But once I was alone in my apartment, and began to imaginatively recreate what I had heard about the spectacle of Severini, I was overwhelmed by its nightmarish essence and several times lapsed into one of my delirious episodes with all of its terrible sensations of a tropical sewer, and all the nightmares of exotic lifeforms breaking out everywhere like rampant pustules and suppurations. And then I suspected that there was a deception involved in this whole Severini business, although even then I thought the deception might be tentative, a period of surreptitious initiation until that perfect moment when I could be accepted into their ranks.

Finally, on a rainy afternoon, as I was working alone in my apartment (making Severini notes), the buzzer signaled that someone was downstairs. The voice over the intercom belonged to a woman named Carla, who was a sculptress and whom I barely knew. When I let her in my apartment she was wet from walking in the rain without a coat or umbrella, although her straight black hair and all-black clothes looked very much the same whether wet or dry. I offered her a towel but she refused, saying she “kind of liked feeling soggy and sickish,” and we went on from there. The reason for her visit to my apartment, she revealed, was to invite me to the first “collective showing” of the Exhibits from the Imaginary Museum. When I asked why I should be receiving this personal invitation in my apartment on a rainy afternoon, she said: “Because the showing is going to be at
his place
, and you’ve never wanted to
go
there.” I said that I would think seriously about attending the showing and asked her if that was all she had to say. “No,” she said as she dug into one of the pockets of her tight damp slacks. “
He
was really the one who wanted me to invite you to the exhibit.
We
never told him about you, but he said that he always felt someone was missing, and for some reason we assumed it was you.” After extracting a piece of paper that had been folded several times, she opened it up and held it before her eyes. “I wrote down what he said,” she said while holding the limp and wrinkled note close to her face with both hands. Her eyes glanced up at me for a moment over the top edge of the unfolded page (her heavy mascara was running down her cheeks in black rivulets), and then she looked down to read the words Severini had told her to write. “He says, ‘You and Severini’—he always calls himself Severini, as if that were someone else—‘you and Severini are sympathetic…’ something—I can hardly read this; it was dark when I wrote it down. Here we go: ‘You and Severini are
sympathetic organisms
’.” She paused to push away a few strands of black, rain-soaked hair that had fallen across her face. She was smiling somewhat idiotically.

“Is that it?” I asked.

“Hold on, he wanted me to get it right. Just one more thing. He said, ‘Tell him that the way into the nightmare is the way out’.” She folded the paper once again and crammed it back into the pocket of her black slacks. “Does any of that mean anything to you?” she asked.

I said that it meant nothing at all to me. After promising that I would most seriously consider attending the exhibit at Severini’s place, I let Carla out of my apartment and back into that rainy afternoon.

I should say that I had never spoken to either Carla or the others about my delirious episodes, with their sensations of a tropical sewer and the emergent concept of the “nightmare of the organism.” I had never told anyone. I had thought that these episodes and the deranged concept of the nightmare of the organism were strictly a private hell, even one that was unique. Until that rainy afternoon, I had considered it only a coincidence that the artworks inspired by Severini, as well as the titles of these works, served to call up the sensations and suggestions of my delirious episodes. Then I was sent a message by Severini, through Carla, that he and I were “sympathetic organisms” and that “the way into the nightmare is the way out.” For some time I had dreamed of being delivered from the suffering of my delirious episodes, and from all the suggestions and sensations that went along with them—the terrible vision that exposed all living things, including myself, as no more than a fungus or a collection of bacteria, a kind of monumental slime-mold quivering across the landscape of this planet (and very likely others). Any deliverance from such a nightmare, I thought, would involve the most drastic (and esoteric) procedures, the most alien (and illicit) practices. And, ultimately, I never believed that this deliverance, or any other, was really possible. It was simply too good, or too evil, to be true—at least this is how it seemed to my mind. Yet all it took was a few words from Severini, as they reached me through Carla, and I began to dream of all kinds of possibilities. In a moment everything had changed. I now became ready to take those steps towards deliverance; in fact,
not
to do so seemed intolerable to me. I absolutely had to find a way out of the nightmare, it seemed, whatever procedures or practices were involved. Severini had taken those steps—I was convinced of that—and I needed to know where they had led him.

As might be imagined, I had worked myself into quite a state even before the night of the showing (of the Exhibits of the Imaginary Museum). But it was more than my frenzy of dreams and anticipation that affected my experiences that night and now affects my ability to relate what occurred at the tumble-down shack on the edge of St. Alban’s Marsh. My delirious episodes previous to that night were nothing (that is, they were the perfection of lucidity) when compared to the delirium that overtakes me every time I attempt to sort out what happened at the marshland shack, my thoughts disintegrating little by little until I pass into a kind of sleeptalking of my own. I saw things with my own eyes and other things with other eyes. And everywhere there were voices…

It was all weedy shadows and frogs croaking in the blackness as I walked along the narrow path that, according to the directions given to me, led to Severini’s place. I left my car parked alongside the road where I saw the vehicles of the others. They had all arrived before me, although I was not in the least bit late for this scheduled artistic event. But they had always been anxious, I had long before noticed, whenever a Severini visit was planned, all that day fidgeting with some restless impulse until nightfall would come and they could leave the city and go out to St. Alban’s Marsh.

I expected to see a light ahead as I walked along that narrow path, but all I heard were frogs croaking in the blackness. The full moon in a cloudless sky revealed to me where I should next step along the path leading to the shack at the edge of the marsh. But even before I reached the clearing where the old shack supposedly stood, my sense of everything around me began to change. A warm mist drifted in from either side of the path like a curtain closing in front of my eyes, and I felt something touch my mind with images and concepts that were from elsewhere. “We are sympathetic organisms,” I heard from the mist. “Draw closer.” But that narrow path seemed to have no end to it, like those passages in my delirious episodes which extended such great distances in the misty darkness of a tropical landscape, where on every side of me there were exotic forms of life spawning and seething without restraint.
I must go to that place
, I thought as if these were my own words and not the words of another voice altogether, a voice full of desperate intensity and confused aspirations. “Calm yourself, Mr. Severini, if you insist I still address you by that name. As your therapist I cannot advise you to pursue this route…chasing miracles, if that is what you
imagine
…this ‘temple,’ as you call it, is an escape from any authentic confrontation with…”

But he did find his way to freedom, although without properly being discharged from the institution, and he went to that place. “
Documentes. Passportas!
” Looking around at those yellow-brown faces, you were finally there. You went to that jungle island, that tropical sewer, a great temple looming out of the misty darkness in your dreams. It rained in every town, the streets streaming like sewers. “
Disentaría
,” pronounced the attending physician. But he was not like any of the doctors whom you sought in that place. Amoebic dysentery—there it was, the nightmare continued, so many forms it could take.
The way into the nightmare is the way out.
And you were willing to follow that nightmare as far as you needed in order to find your way out, just as I was following that narrow path toward your shack on the edge of St. Alban’s Marsh to enter that same nightmare you had brought back with you. The Exhibits of the Imaginary Museum. Your shack was now a gallery of the nightmares you had inspired in the others with your sleeptalking and the
fluctuations
of your form, those outrageous miracles which had not outraged anyone. Only when I was alone in my apartment, imaginatively recreating what the others had told me, could I see those miracles as the nightmares they were. I knew this because of my delirious episodes, which none of the others had known.
They
were the sympathetic organisms, not I. I was antagonistic to you, not sympathetic. Because I would not go into the nightmare, as you had gone. The Temple of Tantric Medicine, this is what you dreamed you would find in that tropical sewer—a place where miracles took place, where that sect of “doctors” could minister with the most esoteric procedures and could carry out their illicit practices. But what did you find instead? “
Disentaría
” pronounced the attending physician. Then a small group of those yellow-brown faces told you, told
us
, about that other temple which had no name. “For the belly sickness,” they said. Amoebic dysentery, simply another version of the nightmare of the organism from which none of the doctors you had seen in the past could deliver you. “How can the disease be cured of itself?” you asked them. “My body—a tumor that was once delivered from the body of another tumor, a lump of disease that is always boiling with its own disease. And my mind—another disease, the disease of a disease. Everywhere my mind sees the disease of other minds and other bodies, these other organisms that are only other diseases, an absolute nightmare of the organism. Where are you taking me!” you screamed (we screamed) at the yellow-brown faces. “Fix the belly sickness. We know, we know.” They chanted these words along the way, it seemed, as the town disappeared behind the trees and the vines, behind the giant flowers that smelled like rotting meat, and the fungus and muck of that tropical sewer. They knew the disease and the nightmare because they lived in that place where the organism flourished without restraint, its forms so varied and exotic, its fate inescapable. “
Disentaría
” pronounced the attending physician. They knew the way through the stonework passages, the walls seeping with slime and soft with mold as they coiled toward the central chamber of the temple without a name. Inside the ruined heart of the temple there were candles burning everywhere; their flickering light revealed an array of temple art and ornamentation. Intricate murals appeared along the walls, mingling with the slime and the mold of that tropical sewer. Sculptures of every size and all shapes projected out of the damp, viscous shadows. At the center of the chamber was a large circular altar, an enormous mandala composed of countless jewels, precious stones, or simply bits of glass that gleamed in the candlelight like a pool of multi-colored slime molds.