Dadaoism (An Anthology)

by Oliver, Reggie

Yes, but aren’t ‘risk’.

  You said ‘chances’.

  I might’ve said ‘chance, what’s the chance?’

  Yes.

  It’s ‘good’, isn’t it?

  What’s the opposite of ‘good’?

  You know the opposite of good.

  You say ‘the chances are bad’? I wouldn’t say that.

  What would you say? my chances are—since you know—what’s the risk?

  ‘Low’? I’d say ‘low’, mibby—of ‘your chances’ too, since it’d be me saying it; and for ‘risk’, of course.

  But if the risk’s low, my chances are high, surely?

  You do say ‘chances’ are ‘high’—‘chances are risks’; you said.

  I said ‘high’. It wasn’t a mistake. It’s because you questioned it I thought it was.

  My chances are poor.

  ‘Poor’! That’s what I’d say instead of ‘bad’. You thought you said ‘bad’, but what you say is ‘poor’, when it comes to the bit.

  When it comes to the bit, I don’t think this can be used to prove telepathy; there’s too much vocalizing.

  He’s looking startled, and thinking back over what we’ve just been saying, working something out about it.

  Isn’t there?

  He’s concluding there’s a good chance.

  It might be useful then. “Why sanitized?” Truthful myself, I gently push others to it.

  “I do think,” he says with careful deliberation, “he couldn’t take the truth,” himself politely declining to, with his wonted consideration of others.

  “You must’ve been clever as a child.”

  “But not as a man. What happened? We’re at the door! That was quick. From there to here when I was thinking I’d only just left there.”

  “You’ve done that before.”

  I’m repeating myself, but he’s not bored—humorously indulgent. I can’t wait to get away from him. I try to see what about him repels me but he appears as affable as ever. I suspect he feels the same about me; he has things to do: tell Eric now or later, do what he has to do first, then tell Eric, or not tell Eric at all.

  “I’ll never forget you for this, for what you’ve done—you know.”

  “You will.

  “So you’ll help prove telepathy,” pops out, apropos of nothing.

  “You do remember. That’s what you want. But,..?”

  “I don’t. I will,” answering both statements, without finding out, by letting him finish what he wasn’t going to, what he sees as the problem, which I may need to know.

  What’s the problem? It’s to do with his helping to prove telepathy.

  How can he help prove telepathy! How can anybody? It’s not how can he—or anybody—prove; he believes it can be. Can it? It’s how can he. There’s some obstacle, the problem he sees.

  I can’t work it out from what he said. Mibby from what I said I can: ‘I don’t (remember). I don’t (want).’ It’s because I don’t remember. Not quite, or he’d’ve finished articulating what the problem is; but the probability is once I remember, I’ll be able to work out what his problem is about helping me get what I will want, to prove telepathy.

  He believes telepathy can be proved because I believe it can. I believe it can; and he can help prove it.

  He won’t. He’s getting what he wants. He’ll have to be made to. But that’s the problem, the very thing made the possibility of proof stands in its way. If telepathy can be proved, there’s a solution.

  What?

  But the door finishes closing.

  I’m looking at the closed door. Is he thinking to open it again, deciding against, listening, as I’m listening, walking away as I’m not? Has the mirroring stopped? I’m tempted to knock, to find out.

  I’ve left him behind! I couldn’t bring him out with me; he lives there, for that is hell—to adapt Marlowe—and I am out of it!—by Cairns—unless I carry a trace of it with me, as, my man elates, I do. I’m infected by bad, like Bob was, unless it was in him, growing as he grew, making him suffer without killing him; he can keep up a good front. How bad can it be? Mibby it’s being human. I have to grow up sometime.

  Mibby Eric’ll alleviate it when he returns. Eric must have a thick skin, to live with that. He can’t enjoy coming back to it. It must affect him. No skin is that thick it protects him.

  There must be antibodies, as for physical disease, spiritual antibodies, antinobodies. Eric’s immunized. More to the point, I am. My man’d never put me in a position I can’t recover from, would you?

  Did he get everything I thought?

  More or less. Did I succeed?

  Yes! It doesn’t feel like it. Thank god it’s over.

  It isn’t; that was only the beginning, but there’ll be breaks. There’ll be breaks.

  An instance from which telepathy can be proved, once the possibility of invalidation by conscious communication of the content has been scotched, the instance realized and reported by one of the principals to a third party, by that party’s eliciting from the other principal his consciousness of having communicated non-vocally and his giving his remembered gist of the content corroborative of the first principal’s account, and by the third party’s confirming their independently conscious accounts are of a communication that could not have been by means available to consciousness.

  What’s that? I didn’t say that, unless sotto voce, while reading it. Did you say that? Did you see that! moving across the door as across a page, then back again. It’s not on the door. I didn’t catch all of it. Only the beginning.

  It doesn’t matter. You were having a flashforward to when typing it.

  It didn’t look like typing, more like ticker-tape; it was all moving to the right as well as the words, possibly letters, but words, spoken and written right off the page.

  Hold onto the banister.

  Computing? It’s the title.

  It’s too long to be a title—was—and it came near the beginning, near the end, in the middle, depending how you look at it, but not at the beginning. You know what it is; you did it.

  You have to go back, on the other side of the door, change something, something about ‘will’, his will, your will, some deliberate confusion that was never resolved.

  I can’t go back. Life is irreversible.

  This isn’t life. This is art, or something; that closing of the door was too contrived to be life—too contrived to be good art. That’s why I want you to go back, find out what life did and do that. It’s only a little way back.

  Hold onto the banister.

  He’s obsessed by banisters.

  It’s probably in the writing. I can go back and check but if I change the writing it won’t change life; you’ll be here, not holding onto the banister, but in the writing false to life it would be a near-enough you to be taken for you not holding or holding onto the banister. If that’s what you want.

  Wait! I want the life and I want the writing. I’d take the life without the writing if I had to; other people do. I’d do without the writing; I don’t want writing false to my life, even if it doesn’t matter if I’m holding onto the banister or not or whether I write I am or not—how can it matter?—but if I do, or don’t, I want the writing to say I did, or didn’t. Does that make sense? It might as well. What’s the point of writing I’m holding the banister when I’m not? because I’m not? ‘Ooh I’ll do something really clever, deny what is and admit what’s not, and they’ll never know what’s true.’

  They’ll think that’s what you are doing.

  Can’t they tell the truth?

  It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong, and write—

  You’re holding onto the banister.

  Exactly!—when I didn’t, though I’d prefer it if you got it right.

  You are holding onto the banister.

  When I am, yes.

  I’m holding onto the banister. Check anyway. Am I holding onto the banister? Of course I’m holding onto the banister. I see I am—but I�
�m not when I remember, and might not remember I am.

  Why am I holding onto the banister? I’m not dizzy.

  It’s not railings. It might be a handrail on top of bars that could be called railings if it weren’t called a banister. It is a banister I’m holding onto the top of with both hands. I’m not calling them railings when they’re not because you mentioned railings in the distant past. (Will that do?)

  I’m flying—about to—flee? fled—flew down the stone stairs from 21 Lansdowne Crescent. I know Bob’s address. You don’t do that in a story. He won’t like it, readers turning up at his door. You don’t do that. It’s not done. You haven’t given my address, not that that...

  It’ll be on the letter. Oh, this isn’t a story for general publication.

  I’m not disappointed. I don’t want to be like any other writer. I am a little disappointed. I didn’t know I meant published, like any other writer.

  Not half as much as he’ll be. You don’t like him. You were making me feel repelled. Don’t do that.

  It is your job, to protect me. What’s wrong with him?

  *

  I was in the hall facing the party room when Betty came out of it, and down on sight of me. “Do you know what’s going on between Robert and Kenneth Roy?”

  “Yes.” She was hoping I’d let her off with the confirmation without elaboration, but I was awaiting proof. “If you want me to, I’ll tell you,”

  I’m expecting to be told

  “but I gave my word I wouldn’t.”

  “Me?”

  She expressed irritation on my picking on other than what she wanted picked up on, that she’d given her word as a lady, with the inference were I a gentleman I wouldn’t want her to break it.

  It was her word, not mine. She’d already indicated she would break it—what sort of lady did that make her?—admittedly as part of an attempt to get out of having to break it. I was a gentle man but wouldn’t let that get in the way of finding out what I wanted to know. What sort of man would I be if I did?

  She was about to break her word Bob had asked her to give, after opportunistically drawing her into what he was confiding to Helen I suspected, in case she should tell me, as was likely, so I’d know what he’d told them—as if I were in cahoots with him.

  “I already know,” I passed her by, looking back to see her take in I’d known, believe I did and that I was checking she did, and was testing her keeping of her given word she had kept, thanks to my not pushing her into breaking it, which she would have had to for me, but I knew that, so why had I been testing her? To ensure as best I could she wouldn’t tell others, and to let her know I knew, that she wouldn’t feel bad at keeping it from me, she concluded.

  It’d do.

  It diminished her. She’d tried that trick before, of putting a man, her husband, on his honour as a gentleman to protect her honour, to get out of breaking her word to other than him—her lover!—about what dishonoured him and was dishonourable in her; and it had worked. And it had worked again, on me. It worked. If it worked on me, it’d work on any man. If I went back to show it didn’t on me, she’d believe it no longer worked and stop using a power she did have and needed, it and more and anything I could give her besides, to protect her interests.

  And in her utmost need, when she asks, I refuse and tell her how to die—Betty’s going to die! We all die; but soon?—in a few years, two to three—which is less than a few—my man said and I interjected.

  You’ll have your reasons.

  Good reasons, you said before.

  It bears the repetition. What good reason could there be for denying Betty help when she asked for it and needed it most?

  When she returned to the party room she didn’t sit beside me but opposite, on the arm of another man’s chair. It was Betty I came back to Glasgow for. And Bob, in this instance, not that I discerned why.

  Someone’d been talking.

  I was in the hall again when Bob isolated me, “I’ve spoken to Kenneth Roy,” he said archly. I oriented, “And he’s giving the money back.” Bob was taken aback by the renewed height of my expectation, “No,” and said carefully, with pleasuring irony, “He gave me an explanation.” “And you believe him?” “You don’t know!”

  I realized I’d said the wrong thing without knowing why it was wrong because, he was right, I didn’t know what he knew; and to have said the right thing, in his estimation right, I’d’ve had to know what I should be knowing. His estimation was right if I was ignorant of what I could know. Bob was assuming if I didn’t know after several days I never would. He was superior to me in understanding and I felt inferior; but, my man assured me, I would know and though it’d be long before I did and I’d know no more than him I’d unaccountably be much the superior. I felt better already without having to wait.

  “I accepted his explanation,” said Bob stiltedly, not a little incredulous at this completest turn to his good fortune, “That settles the matter.”

  Why was he telling me? What had it to do with me?

  *

  Back in Richmond I queried Isobil and decided she’d been told nothing.

  Visiting Helen, who also lived in London, I dropped, “Bob doesn’t seem to like Kenneth Roy very much.” She groaned, went off for no reason other than to facilitate a change of subject, and on returning changed it. I didn’t pursue the matter.

  Louise didn’t know who Kenneth Roy was.

  *

  Twenty-odd years later Bob’s Xmas card vouchsafed a phrase, ‘winding down’. Unwontedly I phoned, to wind him up. He couldn’t avoid telling me he was doing the entry on Betty for the Dictionary of National Biography, revealing the superficiality of his knowledge in thinking who was not was the lover alluded to in her best poem, to me. I followed up in a letter, enclosing an accession sheet of her archived correspondence with me he hadn’t read. To avoid having to check source material, he ended all correspondence with me.

  I was shocked, upset and so angry I heard myself declare, “You do not upset a god!” which I regretted immediately, not so much because of the presumption (I’d never have thought I’d ever commit) since, though I don’t believe my spirit can be immortal, any more than anybody else’s is, he is more peripatetic than others’ and might be considered a god on that score alone, but—because—if the thought did reach Robert it’d affront his, and any reader’s, for, having said it, I was almost bound to write it; it’d make proving telepathy unnecessarily more difficult.

  He had to upset a god to accord with his will.

  I expressed my anger rationally to his publisher, who asked might he forward my letter to Robert as I’d intended he should; it contained information on his subject he might not have I could no longer give directly.

  I then checked his sources in Scotland apart from his own letters from Betty, finding out all together knew less than me. The Edinburgh University Press gave me an address for Kenneth Roy I promised I’d use while doubting he could tell me anything germane. A few days before I did write I remembered what Robert’d told me about him, and told him that. He wrote back saying Robert vehemently denied what he (Robert) had said; and threatening me with solicitors should I write to him again. I wrote back, ‘He would, wouldn’t he,’ applying Mandy Rice-Davies’ dry observation of a self-protecting liar; and added I’d told him the truth, what he did with it was his business.

  I received a letter from Robert’s lawyer threatening action for defamation of character, against which truth is no defence since it is truth defames. It affords some. How would I know what Kenneth Roy instantly recognized, I asked back, if Robert Trotter hadn’t told me. Answer came there nane. It couldn’t be that Betty, Helen or Eric told me, since Robert would’ve had to tell them, an admission he had defamed Kenneth Roy.

  *

  I’ve since realized from unconscious memory this instance, from which telepathy can be proved by you.

  Since it was a mix of the spoken—to clear me of being accessory after the fact—and unspoken wo
rd, I didn’t see how telepathy, nonvocal but verbally understood unconscious communication, could be proved from it. Assuming Robert Trotter’s corroboration, the difficulty was proving the communication wasn’t entirely conscious. This problem was easier to solve than I thought.

  I’d written a book with two endings, one conscious, the second a realization of the unconscious from a point in the conscious narrative, after which I wrote in the duologue style of that realization. There is a clear line of demarcation after the instance with Robert. (You’d have to verify this.) Therefore any communication of the character of unconscious communication with him could only have been itself communicated telepathically. If you elicit from Robert without leading questions the admission we communicated telepathically and his gist corroborates my realization, it can only be the truth. Provided your method of proof isn’t faulty, and my man will help you to ensure it isn’t, you will have proved telepathy, and achieved immortality, at least of name among humankind for almost as long as the species lasts, for yourself, a redeemed Robert and me.

  If you choose not to, or fail, you may not divulge the contents of this to anybody and so make it possible for Robert to know them from conscious communication and thus make it impossible for another reader to prove telepathy from this instance. Have you understood your responsibility?