The Müller-Fokker Effect

by John Sladek

  ‘A naked psychiatrist? Sounds like a Reichian to me,’ said the youth in the copper shirt. He started to explain Reich to the man from Interpol. Ungrateful for the information, that person crawled up on the table of canapés and went to sleep—disconcerting the pilgrims of Babel Tours, who were very hungry.

  Myra never did explain to anyone who had raped her. While it was true that she had ripped her own dress and mussed her own hair, in a way, nevertheless Glen had risen from that urn of ashes and taken her—thoroughly, satisfyingly. And the proof of it was, as she well knew, that she was pregnant.

  ‘O Glen, Glen!’ she sobbed, kissing the silver urn. ‘How could you?’ It was not a technical question. Disappointment and a sense of her own unworthiness engulfed her, and she wept.

  And as much from weeping as from disappointment, her face fell.

  Eighteen: The Camel

  IN HOC SIGNO VINCES (TAKE AS DIRECTED)

  ………. cement reality overshoes at the bottom of the river you only put your future in once I get deeper in debth all the time life begins at forty the numbers game Uncle S’s little joke about the prescription SLEEP NIGHT = 01234 56789 how did it go the woman how did it go I miss Marge scraping carrots makes a dirty joke I’m shocked the year Spot was born a record snowfall take a three digit number walking through the white drifts to the drugstore cover ‘hole’ with four straight lines prescriptions like hieroglyphics secrets of a suburban wife reverse the number subtract reverse the difference and add four straight lines / – x covers any hole where did I hear that secret codes multiply times forty where life begins and translate the answer ciphers secret signs snow like mounds of kotex to the drugstore ‘Uncle S says medicine is killing me’ yes but you need it the prescription prescribes it cure for the common code in the dose

  mestranol take twenty times a moon e pluribus unum and codex romanorum 0.1 mgm. a record snow and the same week I got the wire my cousin Bob was dead ROBRET they coded his name the god of Western Union is the same one with the winged stick and snakes more secret ciphers ye ken one key ‘slat seven’ interpret ‘nine vestals’ where did I get that a record snow and the same week and then Uncle S left us nothing naught zero only a watch and a page of word games the: old cadillionaire managed to take it with him the watch decorative only ran backwards and the games ‘not a gem a megaton’ and Abel was I ere madam I’m adam not a gem all right ‘Ye no MS. I emit’ the watch ran back-works backwords away taketh the Lord giveth this daily dread giveth

  blessed be the name of

  the name of

  the name

  MACK AND MIKE (THEY ONLY LOOK ALIKE)

  ‘Mike as your spiritual adviser, not to say deity, I thought it was time we had a little chat.’

  ‘Why “Mike”?’

  ‘For the same reason you will address me as “Mack”. Look it up in your Cabala.’

  Look it up in your Cabala—a typical line of His. By turns witty pedant and sentimental bully. I’ll do a movie of Him someday, ‘Theo, the Friendly Hound of Heaven’. He’ll love it.

  He usually appears wearing a skin-tight suit of silver, a set of muscles by Michelangelo, flowing turquoise cape, five-o’clock shadow, dark wavy hair. But the jowl is thickening, the muscles recede into layers of beer gut. He is seven feet tall, gold of teeth, impenetrable of sunglasses, a kind of aging Mafia acrobat. Now he plays a little game of church-and-steeple with those enormous hairy animals, his hands.

  Every time I bring up Hiroshima, Vietnam, the death camps, the conquest of Mexico, etc., he changes the subject.

  ‘I mark the sparrow’s fall,’ he says. ‘Look at all the lost pets I’ve guided home through deserts, snowstorms, raging rapids, you name it.’

  Typically I ask who makes the snow, the rapids rage. I never get the last word. Usually I give up after he asks me if I know how many bullets his words have stopped.

  He feels that everyone ought to worship in his own way, that science is going too far and there are some mysteries better left to Him, that the ten commandments are graven in every man’s heart. He’s always on the side of the underdog, the Christian gladiator who fights all Rome, the lone sixgun against the whole town of badmen, the old scientist, his buxom daughter and the young scientist against the giant moles (who luckily are vulnerable to ordinary table salt), David vs. Goliath, Samson vs. Philistines, George vs. Dragon…

  ‘Or Lucifer vs. You?’ I made the mistake of mentioning one day.

  ‘You’re new around here, aren’t you?’

  Today I’m leafing through a glossy magazine, Eternity, as he lectures me on literature. I don’t know prose from poetry, he says (the way he puts it is ‘a pea-rose from a πόα-tree’). He mentions the Negative Confession (‘Look that up in your Egyptian Book of the Dead’), a list of the sins one has not committed (‘litany of the stains’) and a request therefore for a blessing.

  CAFE ISLAND

  I began to survey the island, taking along my stuffed parrot. It was evidence that I was not hallucinating: the hallucinating mind moves straight as robins on course, and has no sense of the ridiculous.

  The island was remarkably symmetrical about the north-south axis, irregularly ovoid. Starting at the south end, I named all the prominent elevations:

  (1) Gibraltar Nich, a rounded hill forming the southern tip of the island.

  (2) The Slip, a pair of ridges running east to west across the island, closing between them a gully with erosion marks.

  (3) Enos Mountain, a gradual slope from the north with a sheer southern face containing the entrances to twin caves. The caves were not connected to each other, as far as I could follow them.

  (4) Robe Wye, so named because it was (unlike other elevations) robed in impenetrable thickets of young trees, and because it forms, with the slope of Enos, a Y shape. Just south of Robe Wye are twin valleys with pine-edged lakes, one either side of Enos.

  On the final day of my survey I came upon a naked human footprint.

  NEGATIVE CONFESSION

  not a powder, not a grind

  no fuss, no muss, no mess

  not a brace, not a truss

  install without fixtures or screws

  no risk

  without narcotics, astringents or surgery

  ETERNITY

  A glossy magazine from his glossy coffee table. All ads for soups, razors, family cars interleaved with disaster pictures. Photo I’ve seen before: some kind of little fire in the middle of a street, something like a shriveled monkey in the flames. No, a man. Caption: HE STOPS BELLIES, TOO. EFFORT? HE STOPS BELLIES, TOO, THATCH KING THIS OTHER EVIL ENDS. REQUEST DICE.

  What are they getting at here? Has the facing page (ad for fire extinguisher) got anything to do with this dream? HE TOPS BELT FORT? HE TOPS BELT, THATCHING HIS OTHER EVIL ENDS. REQUEST ICE. What is all this? The next page is a man throwing rocks at a flamethrowing tank. TOP BET. FOR? TOP BET, THATCH IS THERE VILER QUEST. And leafing both ways, I’m almost at the end of the magazine.

  LIFE ON THE LINEAR

  He can’t keep me here if I want out. I’m an American citizen. But He says He’s already damned the United States, and hopes He may never see nor hear of the United States again.

  Part 4: Haunted Benefactor

  Nineteen

  When Ank had bought the factory near Assholtz there’d been a rough wooden shed built against one of its stone walls. He’d hired masons to cut through the wall, uniting the two structures; then carpenters to extend the shed into a long passage like a covered bridge. It ran nearly a mile from the factory and stopped at the side of a new autobahn. At that end, he installed a padlocked door and an orange-drink stand.

  Large deliveries of plaster, glue, chemicals and paint came to the factory, always by night. Except for the grocery boy, none of the local citizens ever approached it, and though they speculated often about it, no one knew for sure what this rich eccentric American was doing in there. For months, the sound of heavy churning machinery went on day and night.

  Ank
sent telegrams to the world’s major art critics and historians, announcing a show that was to be ‘A.B.’s’ biggest and last.

  Opening day was cold and drizzly. Of the critics who had not ignored his invitation, some proceeded no further than skidding their taxis to a stop on the autobahn. Taking one look at the rough wooden shed with its door chalked ‘THIS WAY TO STORY OF ART’, at the orange-drink stand chalked ‘FREE ORANGE HELP UR SELF’, they ordered their taxis back to the airport. Two dozen faithful and curious men remained, bumping umbrellas, sipping the nauseating beverage, and wondering if Ank were making a fool of them. The door was locked, and he was nowhere in sight. A churning sound came from the distant factory.

  The sound stopped. A thin, haggard man with a crooked beard slogged across a field and greeted them, introducing himself as Ank Bullard—A.B.

  ‘I apologize for keeping you waiting, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘but I wanted to have you all together. My show is also a demonstration of technique, so it’s better to take everyone through at the same time.’ Shivering in his wet clothes, he unlocked the door and led them inside.

  The walls were dirty and cracked by the weather, and the uncertain lighting fooled most of them into thinking this was but a passageway. They began edging their way along one wall, avoiding the great slab of plaster that seemed to take up most of the foot-room.

  Ank stopped them. ‘The story of art,’ he said solemnly. ‘A fresco, ten feet by approximately five thousand feet, incorporating painted commentaries on the works of over thirty thousand artists.’ He gestured at the slab.

  They bent to have a closer look, and as their eyes became accustomed to the gloom, some gasped. One man knelt in the mud to examine the detail.

  The imitations were mixed without apparent design. Picasso’s satyrs teased Reynolds’ ladies, to the amusement of dwarfs by Velasquez. Nearby, a group of Brueghel’s peasants danced in a ring about an odd, octagonal building. Of its three visible faces, one was a modification of American Gothic, one a Magdalenian cave painting of bison, one a Poussin landscape.

  The building was a bandstand, ca. 1900. Its conical roof flew a stiff Jasper Johns flag, and beneath it a Norman Rockwell band fought through what must have been a Sousa march. Closer inspection turned up a few odd bandsmen: A Roman Pan, Donald Duck on trombone, Vermeer’s Woman at a Harpsichord and a Magritte gentleman in bowler hat, playing a thin loaf of bread—all these skillfully blended in.

  Stepping back, one might notice that the bandstand was the conical hat for Rouault’s clown.

  Across a slanted plain marched a perspective of crucifixions, fifty in all, by as many artists, and linked by telephone wires from the wounds. Each had its cluster of worshippers at the foot, though not all seemed to be at the right crucifixion. Thus, Van der Weyden’s patrons knelt to a Francis Bacon cross, Memlinc’s to a Giotto, etc.

  In the foreground was a forest of pedastals supporting Napoleons, kings, cardinals, burghers, etc., and from this a Greek lover chased his beloved and was chased in turn by an iron bird. They seemed headed across the Constable stream towards the baths of Caracalla, where Superman lectured the men whom El Greco’s Messiah was about to drive from the building. The men were all Rembrandt, at various ages.

  Beyond lay a garden where Adams and Eves by dozens of hands all sat down to a Dutch banquet of fruit and game. And so it went.

  What they found so remarkable was not the fresco technique (though in its own way the ‘finding’ of this ‘lost’ art came as a pleasant shock) but the exquisite care in detail. A frescoist must work fast, but even a master would have had to spend hours over some of the fine Flemish parts. Surely this was a work of genius, the first light of Art’s new day!

  At the end, Ank unveiled his machine and explained how it worked: One device drizzled a secret formula of wet plaster into a wide trough. This was partially hardened, then propelled through the painting machine. From there it moved on steel rollers down the shed. The entire, mile-long work was a continuous slab.

  This much they accepted. But when Ank began to explain the painting machine itself, the crowd made known their disbelief and anger.

  ‘A programmed tape? How did you program this tape?’

  ‘I…didn’t. It looks like the random numbers on this tape weren’t random at all. I don’t really know how it came to be that way.’

  ‘Preposterous!’

  ‘Do you expect us to believe…?’

  ‘Show us the machine working, sir!’

  Ank gazed on the hostile faces. Only the old gentleman, a man with a cane, had a kindly expression. The rest clamored for action.

  Ank bent and closed a great copper switch. The lights dimmed momentarily. There was a churning sound. Curds of plaster squittered into the trough, and the whole mass began to move, quivering, down the shed.

  Where it projected from the painting machine the fresco depicted a catacomb; on its shelves, famous reclining nudes. There were four tiers in all, and now, as the critics watched with horror and amusement, the machine simultaneously completed a Goya, a Bonnard, a Tom Wesselman and an Egyptian Osiris.

  ‘A machine! This isn’t art, it’s obscenity!’

  ‘Mechanical monster!’

  ‘I’ve come all this way to see a novelty!’

  ‘Come, Gerard, let’s get out of this madhouse.’

  The body of critics began to bunch up, shoving towards the exit. At the same time, the plaster slab started shrieking and trembling violently. Ank had used an odd formula of plaster and size, extremely elastic. Moreover it had dried unevenly in the damp shed, taking up new stresses. Because of the great weight on the metal rollers, over twenty feet of thick plaster had been pushed out of the machine before the far end began to move.

  Contracting and expanding in uneven ripples, the whole slab built up enormous energy at rest, so that when it did finally expand, the far end twisted on edge and catapulted forward. Carrying everything in its path with it, it pile-drove out the door and into the path of a passing Citröen.

  The man in the Citroen was an American critic of small reputation who had not been invited, but who knew someone who had. It wouldn’t be the first show this tall man with a nose like an ax-blade had crashed.

  He’d had trouble renting a car at the airport, received wrong directions from several people, and now sped along convinced he was on the wrong road. He was even considering stopping at the long shed to ask directions, when an orange-drink stand hurtled out on the road in front of him. The last thing he saw was the figure behind the counter, a rosy-cheeked coquette, painted in the manner of…

  Gainsborough? he wondered, and joined that painter in the past tense.

  Three great tremors passed through the length of the fresco, then it sighed and settled back, exhaling clouds of paint flakes and plaster dust. Only a few scraps of the original surface remained.

  Their clothes were ruined, but the critics were able to take satisfaction from seeing ‘A.B.’ wiped out. They filed out and shared taxis back to town.

  ‘It was beautiful,’ one murmured. ‘Like the mind of man, freed from all history.’

  ‘Of course, of course. But unsuitable, you know.’

  The Citröen had started a fire. Only the American gentleman with the gold cane stayed behind to help Ank fight it. Their efforts proved useless; the entire shed burned and collapsed, and the water they flung only served to finish the fresco’s destruction.

  ‘I was quitting anyway,’ Ank said. ‘Thought I’d get a job in commercial art, settle down…’

  ‘Perhaps I can help you. May I offer you, say, ten thousand dollars for that peculiar tape you spoke of?’

  ‘Ten thousand?’

  The old man wrote a check and handed it to him. ‘Okay?’

  When he was alone, Ank took another look at the check.

  ‘Mac Hines? Mac Hines?’ He slapped himself on the forehead. ‘O Jesus, that’s just great. Machines.’ Thinking of other famous check authors—I. B. Foxy, U. R. Stung, D. S. Windell, I. P. Fr
eely—he tore up the obviously worthless check.

  Twenty

  Grace before mess is read over the p.a. system while each cadet stands behind his chair in a full brace, gazing steadily at a spot one foot above the head of the cadet opposite. After grace, the cadet is allowed to seat himself in the prescribed manner: Draw back the chair, using both hands, to a minimum distance of eleven inches, step smartly to the left side of the chair and sit down quickly and quietly. Both feet are on the floor, the left hand shakes out the napkin with a distinct ‘pop’ and arranges it across the knees and thereafter remains in the lap except when cutting meat.

  The cadet observes strict silence during the meal and occupies no more than the front ⅓ of his seat. He is to look neither to left nor right nor directly at the cadet opposite nor directly at his plate. He pays particular attention to the reading of military inspirational literature during the meal, and if a first-year cadet he will be able to repeat all essential points of the reading at the request of any officer.

  Food is passed from the head of the table; the ranking cadet officer at the head will be served first. Food will not be requested, but passed along briskly or eaten. When the cadet observes by ear that the ranking officer has begun eating, he may and must follow suit.

  When cutting meat the left hand takes the fork, the right takes the knife. As soon as a bite of meat is cut (no less than ¼” or more than ½” square) the right hand lays the knife on the plate at a 45° angle, cutting edge facing outwards and one inch from the edge of the plate. Right hand then takes the fork and left returns immediately to the lap. Demerits will be given for eating bread, not eating, soiled napkin.