Not a Clue

by Chloé Delaume

  The walls aren’t green. Not to bring it up again. The floor must be made of hope so your feet can stay anchored though lacking a grasp on reality. So the walls are yellow, a slightly dirty ochre yellow, a little dull, more discreet. To the left of the door with an unwelcome opaque window inset, a rather ugly painting has made itself right at home. A crude, pastel trompe l’oeil. Awkward invitation to bucolic reveries, bower crossroads leading to a Provençal scene oozing with rich laughing vales and dense thickets.

  You couldn’t care less about all this. You’re all even more sealed off from your environment than from yourselves, have been for a long time. How many hours spent in this room with no attempt to tame it, how many orange trees in your hearts and old willows in the garden, how many. How many. I know, you have no idea. Sometimes one of you or another, another even more damaged than you if that’s even possible, sticks their mouth against the plexiglass, closes their intrepid eyelids, and blows smoke toward this tender horizon. The smoke rings come back lavender-sticky and reeking of laundry detergent. In this South the sun is always bronze, it’s the nicotine halo that ensures the sparkle.

  There are six of you, and you killed me. One of you or maybe each of you. Yes, that’s right. Each of you. The ones who love me must have missed the train, dirty Orient Express seat. I’m not a vengeful ghost, a familiar phantom, a homeless cricket, a spirit rattling yours tapping on a table ringed with people. I’m not an angel either. Really, not in the least. I will not redeem your sins. I won’t punish you. I won’t announce anything to you. I can see you’re very disappointed, but that’s not my role. Nonetheless, we all have our own role, even more in this place than anywhere else. So terribly much more in this place than anywhere else, you know that, everyone has their own role. It’s all very organized. I’m here and that’s all there is to it. For as long as it takes. Time for one simple game, just the time for one simple game. The last one for all of you. The last one for all of us. No one has a choice.

  I’m Dr. Black. My very identity, even in government records, my psychological profile, everything, down to the tiniest details of my biography, to this very day is blank and in your hands. I will be your palimpsest. Because I am less the incarnation of a victim than of murder. Murder, drastic change. The unexpected taking of action, the praxis of your drive.

  Since 1949 a hundred million people have gathered, between three and six players, seated around the representation of my apartment, moving from hypothesis to supposition, from assumption to presumption, until they narrow it down to a proud I accuse. For these past nearly seventy years, accelerated early Sunday morning rhythm, these millions, yet no one, no one, ever lingers over my fictional remains, no one ponders the motive for this ever-solved crime. Never has blood ever transported such indifference.

  There are six of you and you killed me. You think you’re in the smoking lounge. That freezing little room next to the day room. You think you’re safe for a crumb of an hour, meals are served so early. You think you’re isolated, crippled with comforting autism, hunched down over your rancid heart. You’re wrong. That’s not where you are right now. No. Right now you’re in the Study. You feel the air suddenly turn heavy and warm. Your lips get dry, the window hastily swallows up its bars. The tar-covered callouses on your fingers let go, what does it matter if your filter-tipped light cigarettes put a lonely end to themselves, what does it matter, there’s no more ashtray. I’m Dr. Black, I’m dead. There are six of you, and you killed me.

  Your names will be assigned to you simply for the sake of convenience. And coherence too. A rare commodity in your lands. Your age, your appearance, your past, your profession like your appellation will at first seem to have no immediate relation with the identity that will be given you.

  There are six of you and you’re sick. You have come, some of you have come, of your own volition. For others a loved one, a soon-to-be amputated family member, dropped you off, or a nondescript worried third party. No matter the case in so doing they used the term entrust. To try and numb the objectification. You entered this place, Unit 13 Piera Aulagnier Wing, for one sole reason: your internal logic is just too sacrilegious for you to be left on your own.

  Only intermittently are you in the real world now, your lips hardly able to communicate. Your internal murmurs, your repeating fables, every night they inhabit the building that protects the outside from your sneaky witticisms and your intensity. During the day you don’t speak. The hallways soak up songs of despair and reddened laments. You are a chorus of misfits. A disability concert strumming its incompleteness in putrid cinnabar major.

  You’re useless now, the dregs of the carnage, grotesque gagged druids skirting the feast where you should preside as good citizens an overripe apple in your glottis, a bouquet of parsley earplugging your ducts. You are no longer fit for consumption but you are still cowardly tousled shriveled up bluish fear in your gut, unable to face the why that saves, the why of contamination, the why of error. As you scan the question you relentlessly fear that you remain daughters of Lot, turned to statues and salt when the internal clock chimes the hour of reckoning.

  We’re going to play. Together, of course, separately. I won’t be alone, I’ll have assistants. Tonight your brains are little clods of humus whose decomposition you don’t quite grasp. Your mind is compost, your mood hoarse shavings. You’re lost within yourselves. That’s the worst thing. Your bodies are too vast, your brain ricochets your stony thoughts. That’s exactly why I’m here, to make you resonate. To make the death knell rattle rusty pores and synapses. There are six of you, three men and three women, the game will be balanced.

  We can start. The layout respects the original. In other words nine rooms can be read going clockwise. Hall at twelve o’clock. Lounge. Dining Room. Kitchen. Ballroom at six o’clock. Conservatory. Billiard Room. Library. Study. The Conservatory and Lounge are equipped with a secret passage connecting them. As are the Kitchen and Study. Note

  1: in some versions, the Billiard Room is called the Game Room. It’s more practical but not as pretty. Note 2: the apartment has no bathrooms or bedrooms. Many players are surprised by this austere option.

  There are no spaces to move across, since your formatting failed. There’s no board to unfold, no pieces to set up. I said you’re going to play. But definitely not enjoy yourselves. No rushing from room to room, no shoving in the hallways. Either. I made it clear special rules, added unnatural game. I didn’t say naturally. There’s a handful of dice, but it doesn’t matter how they fall, nothing is random. Make no mistake, each and every one of you. Randomness has never ever played a role in your destiny.

  I’m Dr. Black, there are six of you and you killed me. They say you’re insane. It’s an accepted fact. They say you’re insane simply because someone who’s maladjusted to reality can’t be in sync with it. Your sticky organs overflow with agony, your suffering swells into plump Furies, it’s too late to recycle you, use you for transplants, you’re nothing but refuse whose social matrix can no longer be reloaded, it’s impossible for it to move inside you, its roots contract into a wounded anemone on the verge of penetration.

  Find the right cards, the right combination. You have eight rooms left, the Study doesn’t count, you’ve been told. You have eight rooms left, and the choice of weapons. Have a good look at the list: six, in other words, one for each of you. Candlestick, revolver, rope, lead pipe, dagger, monkey wrench.

  And above all, yes above all, remember why. Why you killed me. Remember the instant my breath escaped before your eyes dull with lust, haste, greed; remember the instant, because the instant was specific and it did exist. There was a before. There was an after. In between there was. A drive, a desire, and then the willingness.

  Don’t say, it all caught up with me. You gave in, and that’s different. No one gets caught by the unspeakable, no one. The old proverb says so. What’s bred in the flesh will naturally come out in the bone. Nothing is less natural than compromising your principles. You were born so
ns of the Word. Language doesn’t bend. It remains irreducible, and that’s why it will outlive mankind. Don’t look for an excuse among the generations. Yours, whatever it may be, in its different layers carries angels, aborted demons, warriors, creators, and bell ringers. The proof is in your contrasts, here pink cheeks and there pepperiness invading the hairline flower. Stop waving your softer pathologies at me like a bunch of screaming spotless flags. For you insanity is simply a consequence. I insist on the term. Simply a consequence. I insist on the term and on its adverb. The instant when awareness leapt out at you, exhausting your lucidity-gashed flesh, you remember. So don’t pretend. You’re hiding in a minor disorder, it lets you flee the sordid acidity of what could be called responsibility. In your charming rooms, every day you avoid the questioning that should be unique, invasive, methodically analyzed. Why, why you killed me. All day long I see specialists kneeling at your bedsides, their scalpel champing at the bit with impatience: why, why didn’t he didn’t she keep going. At night they take your screams for spreading symptoms that must be alleviated to relieve your shrill-shredded throats, while with each second your whole being yearns even more to simply dissolve into the obscure clamor verging on oblivion.

  On the grounds, in the refectory, the hallways, the smoking lounge, the cafeterias, and studies, you see your doubles, you think. The people in the gowns that tie in the back. Who mutter in distress, all their energy in howling and sharing. You’re wrong to see them as a safe haven to migrate into. The people in the gowns that tie in the back have never been part of the world, they remain incorruptible, you are foreign to them. They know that feverish you seek rest, salvation, and something to quench your thirst for ignorance. They let you remain generous bow down straitjacket verbena pediment, they let you take part in single-file rites bottom-of-the-cup three tablets twenty-five canary yellow drops, you drink the potion, but you still don’t know how disjointed the rite is for shamans. There are six of you, you are alone, a stuffed mynah bird stands in for your memory, your tartar-clot tears scratch your corneas plow your cheekbones into furrows more sterile than horror could ever be.

  I offer you the riddle a sphinx suggested to me. In the morning immaculate naive I stream. At noon muddled inner ear I stumble. At vespers I turn over, wondering, who am I. To survive figure it out. I repeat. Figure it out. And take off that modesty it doesn’t match your complexion. I’m going to tell you a secret. Your head is not what’s sick. Your head is fine. It invents nine lives for you, an escape cat flap, Cheshire smile. No, your head isn’t sick. It’s your ventricle. A shell hole in your atrium, emptiness pumped, staggering emptiness at your aorta, emptiness embalming your tracheas. And tonight, in this room, the Unit 13 smoking lounge, otherwise known as the Study in this Interior Game of Clue, you are not Dr. Lagarigue’s patients. You are my killers, your own murderers. Tonight, you are six characters in search of a heart.

  First Officer

  They don’t let me say I. I’m not allowed. This is my first invitation ever. I’m afraid of being clumsy, muddled, a little awkward. Of failing in my task, though that’s all I really am. See, words fail me, though I know them all, though I wield them all, juggling from word one, triple-axeling paragraphs, arabesquing chapters finishing period double toe loop. Words forsake my alms purse, I’m touched, can’t you see. It’s more than simple satisfaction, than dazzling happiness, than a barely grazed fantasy now palpitating so suddenly real it makes your eyes water.

  Please know, I am ageless and yet I have never ever been. Never really been. Deprived of organs, I am a voice, barely a voice. A disgorged trickle, a red braided strand, a knitted vein. I am everywhere without existing. Can’t you see. I speak for everyone, but I am not. I take care of everyone, linger over every detail, yet no one, ever, worries about me. Every day keeper of the keys I go on, no one shows me respect, interest, or even deference. Anyway, I wouldn’t ask for so much. Just for someone to think of me a little, of me a little once in a while. Maybe not like a person, someone, an individual. But like an entity, that would be nice, I think. Because I do think, you see. Yes, like an ever so slightly tangible autonomous entity.

  Gazes slip right over me, even the fall rain seems less transparent. It’s unusual for anyone to linger over the fine minutia of my little reports. Sometimes I’m avoided: I’m thought to be boring, burdensome, and useless. I am condescendingly examined for purposes of dissection only. A living autopsy: there are probably prophecies lying in my entrails, I know every destiny, from the moment of the embryo my delivery is sought.

  You can hear me, right. You can hear me, I’m talking about me. I’m not complaining, you know. I’m confiding, it’s different. Also I’m explaining things to you a little. Explaining is something I know how to do. Explaining, exposing, quantifying, and analyzing. It’s just that I have a scientific mind, that’s what’s always needed, even in the other hemisphere. But I don’t have any, hemispheres I mean. I would have really liked to, though. Have a brain and blood, blood coursing at full speed and then fleeing after a cut. Getting a cut, I would’ve liked that too. I know all the words that can be used to describe a wound, no matter its origin or even its depth. I know all the words to describe the turmoil flowing from the gash please keep comma and how to combine them so the syntax is best clotted, sticky, or hemophiliac. I know pleasure’s properties, pain, and paradoxes. I know them right down to their structure, their sounds, and their morphology. I know them, they are my flesh, Christ’s flesh, right, take and eat all of you, it sounds familiar, it’s my routine. Because if I am a nobody, at least I have a function.

  I am a living pillar, without me the greatest edifices, the greatest artifices, would heart murmur in the end. I am a stylistic mode, in my bosom I carry knowledge that no Rabelaisian abbey and no mortal could ever imagine. I’m genderless but have dissolved into each one since the very first line that ever was. I have neither past nor future. I am for all currently, a thousand and one simultaneous nights. I am more listened to than heard. People implore me, I spread. I am the guide, informer, holder of all formal and future vices. With a simple line I point out a destiny’s clumsiness, employ a pair of quotation marks to inform the reader of contextual savor, whip up armies from genealogies of Dantean Waterloos, foresee nouns the conspiracies being plotted.

  I am the omniscient narrator.

  This is my only known name.

  The masculine status was imposed upon me without consultation, otherwise I wouldn’t have let myself get pushed around. Omniscient narrator after all what does it even mean. A data base, to be sure. Flicking in indentation, hanging off tables, flying off thirtieth step, wintery landscape, pink garland and pine treed first lines aroma of predestination. Keyhole description, perpetual violator of fictional intimacy, relentless plowman of languishing secrets. The omniscient narrator is the Banana Republic of Literature’s intermediary citizen. I am Master Crow upon my pages I sit, distilling passives and shameful thoughts. I am the handful of reeds King Midas peddling to the west wind has donkey’s ears. It’s been so long since I’ve had a closer look. The masculine certainly cannot be my own. I stay in my dressing room from the beginnings to the absolute ends, parroting, I open the curtain a sliver, I meddle, I intervene, scheming, I jest. I am the chief caretaker of the fictional world, I demand feminization and a raise.

  I’m delighted to have been given the chance to speak. I will always be grateful to Dr. Black for choosing me to help him out. Doctor, thank you (head nods and applause). With the reader denying my existence, don’t imagine I can feel anything at all during my unending third person singular third person plural. Yet I’m bored to death till I cough up the final period. I grieve too, and often, sorrow like an anvil and lava when I have to bear witness, relating my dying heroines’ final spasms. Fake omniscient narrators, in other words characters themselves retracing a story whose every recess they know for having lived it sometime before, don’t have a monopoly on fictional pain. No matter what they say, obviously. Sometimes I cry right
from the watermark and the ink dribbles from certain words. Conscientious editors give the printer a good going over, handkerchief remaindered copies. But there’s no solution, in the reprint my tears again sully the embossing, the bible, or the vellum. Because I do feel, don’t you see.

  It’s a little different for you. I won’t cry for you six. I am the omniscient narratrix, the legend to your roadmap. You will come in my wake. I will clear the way for each of you, preside over your abusive groping all throughout your larval investigation. I’m the one who gives out the roles, holds the information, oversees the order you go in. I’m first violin smuggler. Coronation leader.

  You’re wondering, each and every one of you, when and how you killed. Why remains your own business. I’ll plant pious adverbs, see how useful I am to you.

  I am the omniscient narratrix. I have a fondness for italics, they smooth any curves on the hips, but I won’t give in to vanity. You can relight your cigarette. I hereby proclaim the official and definitive opening of the first round. I’m your crutch. Arise from your astonishment.