Thompson Mechagnosis

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-907133-61-9
Verlag: Dog Horn Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

Scott Malthrop is a murderer with a difference: his entire house is filled with an enormous device gradually assembled by him and his father over four decades. Known only as 'The Machine' the device seems to transport Malthrop to different locations in space and time by feeding off his memories and a vast array of sentimental objects and trophies taken by Malthrop from his own past and that of his victims. As Malthrop's experiments become ever more violent and life-threatening, they cause distortions in the surrounding quantum fabric, and spark off pursuit from two very different directions: a local Police Inspector and two 'Angels' sent back from the end of time.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Thompson, Douglas

Leseproben

~The Machine Starts~

Scott Malthrop climbs aloft through the dusty skylight, out to the big roof and ruffling birds. It is time. How like waves their wings lift his breaths and cloud the eyes. Fresh fluttersong of washing-lines: glimpsed mysteries of neighbours in solitariness. The sweet grain of urban monotony, secrets unshared. The sun goes down like eyelids closing, bracing grimace, dignity of pain.

Malthrop has access to several apartment roofs as well as his own, and these he has gradually colonised with foliage and bait for birds, and cages to catch them. In the early days of his father’s first experiments, perhaps some of the birds were run to death. This was foolish and short-sighted as well as immoral. Now every bird is only temporarily captured and put to work then re-released a week later into the beckoning sky, well-rewarded for its labour. Malthrop has come to love the birds, their calm eyes and fluttering hearts. Although he rarely tags them, he believes some return on purpose, wanting to be captured again, for the exercise and the food, maybe even for his company.

Today he enlists only a dozen and releases the others, taking them below in wooden cages, down through the roof hatch into his apartment, or what used to be an apartment. Now it is only residual, marginal, left over space around The Machine. The Machine occupies all three storeys of his narrow urban townhouse, from front to back, cogs and levers up against windows and walls, floor joists long cut away and braced to make room for wheels and pistons.

He times his start-up phase to coincide with the busiest periods of traffic outside, so the neighbours will not be overly alarmed by the considerable vibrations. Sometimes he likes to use a few seagulls for extra power, but today the team are all pigeons, city doves, his trusty stalwarts. The Intake Platforms consist of wheels and wing harnesses within ventilated glass tanks and seed dispensers. Malthrop kisses and caresses each bird one after the other, calming and soothing its palpitations before depositing it gently down a one-way tube onto its running wheel. When all twelve avian pilots are assembled, he salutes them with a tired smile then descends below to rope himself into the control room.

We say “control”, and yet the whole essence of this room is a lack of control. A statistical degree of hazard has been built in, essential to guarantee a sense of danger on the part of the operator. A one in one hundred chance always exists that the Dead Man’s Lever will fall and Malthrop suffocate in sand or water. In such a scenario, his skeleton will eventually become part of The Machine, as his father and mother are already: just one of a thousand sentimental objects incorporated for esoteric functions which somehow contribute to its overall spiritual charge.

One thing is for certain: when The Machine is working, every component, at some point, must move. The toy yacht with white sails that his father built him when he was aged three, will rotate and rock on salty waves in an old bathtub. His mother’s swimsuit will be stretched and flexed like a washing machine’s drive-band. The crackling gramophone record of the sound of seagulls will repeat while the sand from the first beach he ever played on pours like an hourglass from vessel to vessel: colourful bright plastic pales from beaches; grim janitorial buckets that caught waterdrops from the roof leaks in his first school.

Malthrop sits and writes his diary entry, aware as ever that it may be his last:

The word “Nostalgia” was only invented in 1688, by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, to describe a medical condition of near-fatal homesickness. If, as Wittgenstein said, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”, then did nostalgia simply not exist before this date, if it could only be so clumsily denoted as wistfulness for days passed?

Father made me memorise the dates. 1674: The English agricultural pioneer Jethro Tull is born. 1701: he invents the seed drill, setting off the Agricultural Revolution and in turn the Industrial Revolution. Mechanisation gets underway and the traditional way of life of the rural peasant is doomed to history. This is how history works: from the tiniest insignificance a chain of events grows too slowly for anyone to ponder or stop. A seed drill is invented and men land on the moon. The Machine starts. Tonight I might die.

—Scott Malthrop, son of Scott Malthrop Senior (deceased), 30 th April 2020.

Malthrop binds and gags himself until completely helpless, throws his head back onto The Starter Pad. The chamber he is locked within begins to fall and rotate on an infinitesimally slow orbit through The Presses. Although, like life on Earth, at any given moment he can feel entirely static, in truth he is perpetually in motion and danger. Gradually over hours, water and soil come and go: plants from his parents’ garden, grass from the park where he kissed his first girlfriend, water from the bath in which he drowned her. His wrist bindings are coils of her black hair, and when The Machine stretches him over its cruellest segments, deprived of air, he will struggle and her tresses will dig deep into his flesh as he screams, washed in his own blood and tears.

Above him or below somewhere, as the great calibrated wheels rotate, the birds will flap and pedal on with industrial ferocity, rest-times kicking in and alternating, the tag team dutifully working through the night. Their calm eyes remain relentless in their purpose, profoundly understood. Animals have no concept of futility.

What was the first machine in the world I wonder? The slingshot? The Shadoof? Archimedes’ Screw? The Buddhist prayer wheel... now there’s an interesting one: a machine played by the wind, by the Gods themselves, with only a spiritual purpose. Sometime after the dawn of the machine age, the backlash quietly began: the absurd machines of eccentric inventors have sprung up simultaneously all over the planet, like spring flowers magically blossoming in the shade of a broad oak. Heath Robinson, Rube Goldberg , every culture today has its own name and equivalent: in France The Gas Factory , Denmark Storm P Machines , in Bengal Abol Tool , in Japan Chindogu and Pythagoras Switch , Turkey Zihni Sinir Proceleri . The beauty and universal appeal of these devices, particularly to children (the most devout little anarchists amongst us), resides in their very inefficiency, their transparent futility. But Man and Machine have unfinished business since 1701. Has irrational beauty really no term within our mathematical equations? If these machines are pointless then Life is pointless. But if we can bring ourselves to say that such machines are sublimely beautiful, what then? Then the metaphor, the microcosm is grasped, and we may be healed. The most perfectly futile, the most sublime and absurd machines of all are of course: ourselves. We must embrace futility and absurdity. We must seize the machines that so wound us and make them part of us again, make love to them, make them as magnificently ludicrous as ourselves. Then we, and they, will be whole again, and God will smile.

Malthrop’s mother had been obsessed with cleanliness. The droning of the vacuum cleaner not once but twice a week, was the oppressive music of his childhood. Not satisfied with this, she had purchased a separate vacuum for each storey of the house and inducted Malthrop and his father into operating each of these simultaneously while she worked her fastidious routine. The resultant wall of noise must have tried the neighbours’ patience sorely, but since Malthrop seldom saw them he soon presumed them stone deaf, mad, or dead from the attrition. Perhaps they were good solid walls, and just as well.

What drove his father most to despair, was how the Hoovering regime had to go on regardless of other commitments and weather. Although Malthrop’s parents were fond of a weekend walk together in the country, often this would have to be undertaken at sunset, twilight, or black of night, the day’s preceding sunlight having been cruelly squandered on the manic removal of dust.

Then there were the washing machines. Three of them. One each. Malthrop believed that other families allowed their worn linen to accumulate for a day or two, in charming wicker baskets. But in his mother’s regime anything handed in dirty would have to be washed within the hour, even if it meant it had to be the only item in the drum. It was inconceivable to him how he might go about explaining to his school teachers that he was exhausted and inattentive in class due to sleep loss from washing machine noise. He almost envied his classmates their simpler traditional pleasures of fighting parents and teenage brothers with loud music.

When The Machine is in perfect motion: whirring, exquisitely organised, and Malthrop bound, robbed of control of his own destiny; he can at last begin to dream and drift. Time dissolves for hours and days on end. He has no moon or sunlight, partial sensory deprivation takes hold. Space, the materiality of the walls, dissolves. He sees a beach, perhaps it is the sand pouring down tubes near his neck, but no: he is really there now on that beach. He stands up and looks around. He looks down and sees his arms are bound with seaweed, breaking off easily, dissolving. He feels a rumbling beneath his...