The Secret of Ventriloquism

by Jon Padgett

  STEP 14

  “The dummy is a trifle”

  It is best not to think about what must come next. Simply listen to this voice guiding you on and let go. Without effort, completely let go. By now, you should be able to see a shadowy, slightly glowing reflection of yourself and your dummy in the mirror. Look at your dummy, sitting on your knee as always, in the mirror’s reflection. Now set it carefully on a chair next to yours. Make sure it is stable. Make sure you can see the dummy’s whole head reflected in the mirror. Set its eyes to look straight into your eyes. Now make sure for the remainder of the lesson that you are not touching it in any way. The dummy is a trifle. It is nothing. Stare at your dummy. Clear your mind of everything but your dummy on the stool in the mirror in front of you, specifically its eyes. Consider those eyes (they are nothing), but now think about the other side of them that you cannot see (the eye swivel mechanism attached to the cords that run down its head into the grooves in the control handle within your dummy’s otherwise hollow body). The dummy is a trifle. It is nothing. Gently clear your mind of all thought. Stare at your dummy without blinking. As you consider your dummy’s perfectly still form in the mirror, your eyes may burn; your pulse rate may increase—an unpleasant feeling that you are getting too little air—a squeezing sensation up and down your torso as if something is twisting inside you. You may begin to imagine you hear something like static or even the roar of an airliner. You may feel lightheaded, like you are going to pass out. Ignore these feelings. They are normal. They indicate that you are coming into perfect sync with the dummy’s empty body and empty head (it is a trifle). Your own body and mind and all its living organs will resist communion with this dead matter. Clear your mind of that pain and panic and replace it with a perfect schematic of your dummy’s eyes and the mechanism within them. Do not blink. Do not move. Now... when you have lost all sense of where you are or even what you are, conscious only of your dummy, make your dummy’s eyes move. How? After all those hundreds of weeks and those thousands of hours, moving your dummy is no different than moving your legs. Your body is no longer limited to the bag of meat and bones you were born into. Now... put yourself together. The first time it happens you will not remember seeing those dummy eyes shifting to its left. You will see the dummy’s eyes right up until you know they are about to move, and suddenly it seems that you are no longer looking at the dummy at all. You did it. You will find the undeniable reality: those dummy eyes have indeed moved from their original position. And not only did they move to the left, but—just for a moment—you seemed to be looking out of those glassy, dummy eyes yourself. Being sick to your stomach now is perfectly normal.

  STEP 15

  “No more dummies”

  Ventriloquists talk to themselves and Greater Ventriloquists talk to themselves even when they are not actually talking. It is a fact—an inescapable side effect of all those thousands of practice sessions staring at yourself in a mirror; all those thousands of hours spent manufacturing a pretend-relationship with a doll or with their animal-dummy cohorts. But by now you should be stripped of these delusions of dummy-identity. You know it and they are trifles. And it is high time to dispense with these toys and sentimental trappings and get down to real work. No more dummies at all.

  STEP 16

  “See the world”

  There were some surprises after you mastered STEP 14 (“The dummy is a trifle”). Surprise 1: ever since you mastered STEP 14, your stomach is a wreck, and you are not eating or drinking much. That is normal. Surprise 2: you have lost your ability to throw your voice or make your dummy move in any conventional sense. You have tried to force the dummy to speak a couple of times out of what you imagined was sheer boredom, but you discovered that the sound of the dummy’s voice had terribly changed the several times you tried it—a horribly painful noise to the ear, like radio static layered across the tortured squeal of failing brakes on a car. I would say that is normal, but I am not sure that it is. What does it matter, though? Throwing your voice—pah—simple steps any fool could master. You have gone far beyond those parlor tricks now. Surprise 3: you know deep down just what the dummy is going to do before it does it. Don’t you? More static. Try not to be anxious about all of this static. It is a trifle. Speaking of which—you know what that old dummy of yours would say if it was still talking? “Get out of here, animal-dummy,” it would say. “See the world and show ‘em what ya got.” The dummy is right, isn’t it? Thanks to your tremendous powers of Greater Ventriloquism, you can do almost anything.

  STEP 17

  “Controlling animal-dummies... and beyond”

  Start with that street bum—the one you may have seen many times before lurking on these seedy streets. Just relax and take one step at a time. If you stop resisting, you will find yourself almost floating towards that old heap of junk. Good. There the rummy is, as expected, passed out under those filthy boxes, a bottle almost empty by its side. The dummy is a trifle. It is nothing. No, of course you are not going to intentionally hurt the poor rummy-dummy. Though—just in case—make sure that it is bound securely to that rusty pylon before you begin your practice. It is quite unconscious and is oblivious to the tightness of your belt around its wrists. Well, perhaps that is not true. It is rousing after all, making quite a display of hacking and spitting. Look, it is even opening its crazed, bloodshot eyes to gaze upon you. “Maybe I shouldn’t a had that last bottle,” the dumb-bummy mutters. Don’t you think it almost looks real? Now simply stare at the rummy. Gently clear your mind of all thought and stare without blinking at this mad old thing tied up in front of you. As you consider its perfectly still form, your eyes may burn; your pulse rate may increase—an unpleasant feeling that you are getting too little air—a squeezing sensation up and down your torso as if something is twisting inside. You may imagine you hear something like static or even the roar of an airliner. You may feel lightheaded, like you are going to pass out. Ignore these feelings. They are normal. Now repeat, “Let me put you together,” out loud a few times. It is amazing how easy it is and how quickly it all begins. Who knew human limbs could be rearranged like that or that human skin could be so flexible? And look: once its bones are quite gone, doesn’t the old rummy-dummy look rather like a slowly melting bar of dirty butter?

  STEP 18

  “You did it”

  Now that you are all done with what passes for a rummy-dummy and now that you have more or less recovered from STEP 17, it is time to set your sights on the skies. Simply look up and wait. There it is now: a large airliner descending some thousands of feet above you, landing gear locking into place. You cannot help yourself, can you? That’s right. Just stare at it. Raise that trembling arm. Visualize your arm becoming a crimson mass of spiraling, twitching cords shooting up towards the sky—towards the jet. Watch the emptying mechanism of the aircraft as it comes apart. Watch as the many animal-dummies within are put together—melting flesh with steel and plastic, rearranging and fusing. Witness the airliner-thing’s sudden, unnaturally steep and speedy descent into the city’s skyline just beyond your sight. Then, some moments later, listen to the tremendous concussion followed by the roar of muffled static beyond the horizon. You did it. You pushed the lever that pulled the cord that made an airliner go down. What a bad boy you are.

  STEP 19

  “Ultimate Ventriloquism”

  The early ventriloquists or gastromancers, literally gut-diviners, were priests—mostly ancient-world hucksters who fooled the ignorant masses into thinking the hollow dummy-idol next to them was speaking with the voice of a god. But every now and again down through the ages, a special kind of ventriloquist-animal-dummy has fallen upon the secret of the only true god—the Ultimate Ventriloquist—by staring a little too long at a reflection or image of itself—unlocking secrets which in fact can only be discovered through the careful, diligent practice of lesser and then Greater Ventriloquism, which leads inexorably to extreme dummy manipulation through the miracle of the Ultimate Ventriloquist
, that mysterious archon of manipulation and hollowing. It has so many names, and, truly, no name at all. Now it is time for the most challenging STEP of all but certainly the one that feels the most natural—the most automatic. Cut into your left wrist with a jagged bit of something convenient. Do not resist. Just remember the warning from STEP 9 (“They are all dummies”): turning back is not an option you can exercise at this point. Really open that wrist up. Now, begin to dissect your left arm. There is no need to be careful about it. Search methodically for the cords and the dummy mechanisms inside your arm. Continue the dissection. You may scream. Your pulse rate may race—an excruciating feeling that you are getting too little air—a squeezing sensation throughout your body as if something is twisting its way out. You may begin to imagine you hear something that sounds like static or even the roar of an airliner. You may feel lightheaded like you are going to pass out. Ignore these feelings. They are normal. Now look at what you have found—look into the mirror at yourself one final time. See the twisting, pulsating, intricately connected, pulpy limbs within your limbs—not only inside but like a great, living web behind and around you. See the bloody cords for what they are now. See that which twitches and pulsates within and outside of torn, translucent flesh. Understand: the throbbing red pulp within and around you is nothing but the barest trifle of the blackness of those horrible cords and pulleys and levers and stitches that hold the universe together—you and your dummy and all those hapless, ignorant animal-dummies out there. Yes, you are certainly learning this final STEP the hard way. But, then, that is the only way anyone can ever learn it. All those years yearning for control—ultimate control—over your life and the animal-dummies in it have led to this final moment of surrender. And as you are finally becoming yourself—as the Ultimate Ventriloquist finds a way to speak through you at last—feel its intangible, alien voice twisting through that throat and that mouth, telling us that you have only ever been one of its myriad, crimson arms. Every moment those bloody limbs that are not your limbs become stiffer and colder and that buzzing mind that is not your mind tries to empty itself of the nonsense of sanity and static it has been full of for too long. You are a trifle. You are nothing. Feel that voice that is not a voice bubbling through that mouth that is not a mouth. Let it purge you of your static. Let it fill you with its own static. Now speak in the language of the Ultimate Ventriloquist—that high pitched, hideous glossolalia worming its way up through those exposed, dead lungs and those exposed, dead vocal cords. You did it. You have found your “dummy voice,” which is indeed nothing like the voice you once recognized as your own. And as those shrieks mount in volume and intensity, feel the presence of the Ultimate Ventriloquist with a body that is not a body and meditate on the presence of the Ultimate Ventriloquist with a mind that is not a mind.

  STEP 20

  We Greater Ventriloquists are acolytes of the Ultimate Ventriloquist. We Greater Ventriloquists are catatonics, emptied of illusions of selfhood and identity. We Greater Ventriloquists no longer toil in any physical way. We think nothing and do nothing. But we Greater Ventriloquists are active. We are active as nature moves us to be: perfect receivers and transmitters of nothing with nothing to stifle the voice of our perfect suffering. Yes, we Greater Ventriloquists speak with the voice of nature making itself suffer. Nothing could be more normal than that. This head is a useless mechanism. Cast it aside. We do not need it anymore. There is nothing but the voice of this pain and this panic thrown into the darkness. It all starts when someone like you begins to suspect that everything is a trifle. When someone like you looks at itself in a mirror too long. When someone like you melts the flesh of a street bum into a quivering puddle on the pavement. When someone like you brings a plane down. When someone like you reads these 20 simple steps to ventriloquism. When someone like you is put together. When someone like you is put together. When someone like you is put together.

  The Infusorium

  “They were firing up for the grade and the smoke was belching out, but it didn’t rise. I mean it didn’t go up at all. It just spilled out over the lip of the stack like a black liquid, like ink or oil, and rolled down to the ground and lay there. My God, it just lay there!”

  —Berton Roueché, “The Fog,” The New Yorker, 1950

  - 1 -

  At first I couldn’t get the fucking skull to stop screaming no matter what I did.

  But you don’t want to hear about that.

  You want to know why I killed him.

  - 2 -

  I was on my way to the university library. The fog had gone from yellowish to brownish, and visibility had fallen to about twenty yards in any direction. It was the first chill air of the season, but it was stagnant air—oppressive, smelly smog that stung my eyes and produced many sneezing and wheezing fits. Lucky me, I’m asthmatic and had already gone through about five puffs of my inhaler that morning with diminishing returns.

  The night before, the local weatherman described the atmospheric condition in Dunnstown as being “...like putting a lit cigarette in a bowl then placing a blanket on top of that. The smoke has no way of escaping.” Paper mill days, we call them, when the factories north of town bring the omnipresent smell of farts among us. On those days, a dark fishbowl haze shrouds the city. A lit cigarette in a bowl. Good description. Made me want to light up. I guess smoking two packs a day on top of everything else didn’t help my asthma, but that’s a different story.

  Once in the library, I remembered how much I hated them. The musty stench. The tense, forced silence. And especially the librarians themselves—mostly old, testy bats and coots. I’m not talking about the young library assistants and other cart pushers they have working there. I mean the self-important bozos who run the place.

  As I walked through the sliding glass doors, I approached one such bug-eyed geezer at the circulation desk.

  “Detective Tosto, Dunnstown PD,” I said, flashing my badge.

  Bug-eyes stared at me as if he’d never seen a female cop before. Asked me what my business was with a shitty little sneer on his face. Yeah, librarians like bug-eyes burn my ass.

  “Need some help researching a local crime scene. Do I need to talk to your boss?”

  Bug-eyes flinched and referred me to the reference department. Specifically to Mr. Solomon Kroth, a tall man with a fancy mane of gray hair and a lean, serious face of the kind I favor. He and I recognized early on that we were both outsiders. Had a nice back and forth about the Deep South, the city of Dunnstown in particular, and back-asswards residents like my partner. Unlike bug-eyes, Kroth was friendly—enthusiastic even. Unusual in a librarian, at least in my experience.

  I asked him about Treasure Forest. Beaming, he directed me to the second floor to Collections and the Government Serials department, where I would find old periodicals and copies of city archives. A lot of what I read about up there mentioned a lone paper mill in the area I was interested in. It was a pretty old factory. Built in the mid-nineteenth century. It transitioned to printing press and back to pulp mill in the early twentieth century. The city condemned the factory in the 50s when twenty workers and half as many townsfolk died in a little known environmental clusterfuck. And there the defunct factory complex still stands in that smoldering fishbowl, Treasure Forest, in the middle of what is now Dunnstown’s Municipal Park.

  After several hours, I went back downstairs to the Reference department and asked Kroth what he knew about the old mill. He retrieved a few overhead photos of the place to show me, pointing out that the vegetation in the area didn’t seem to touch the factory.

  “Another interesting fact about the mill grounds,” Kroth said. “Treasure Forest typically has a kind of lingering smoke that clings to the ground, even on clear days. And visible particulate matter.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I’ve seen it. Heard the City of Dunnstown has a controlled fire going on nearby to clear brush.”

  “Oh yuh-yes. That’s what they say. Huh-huh-here’s where the matter becomes even mor
e interesting. There’s actually evidence I found in several old local periodicals that the Treasure Forest area has been inundated with this atmospheric effect for decades. The smoke is, I believe, duh-due to some kind of lingering, toxic effect of the old factory’s presence.”

  It was cute how the librarian started to stutter and kind of hopped when he got enthusiastic. It was clear that Treasure Forest and this mill really floated Kroth’s boat. Fun for him. Helpful (and amusing) for me.

  “Detective Tosto, would you mind stepping into my office?” Kroth asked, leading me into a large, glorified cubicle.

  “Please, call me Raph. Everyone does.” Thought the fucker was about to ask me out to dinner, and I was inclined to take him up on the offer.

  “Ah, yes. Puh-please sit. Tell me, detective, what is your interest in Treasure Forest and the mill within it?”

  “Probably nothing. Just part of a little case I’ve been working on,” I said, reclining on a squeaky, time worn chair. That’s when I noticed the odd illustration pinned above Kroth’s workstation. It consisted of a white tree on a black background—the upper half with leafy growth and the bottom half entwined with skeletal roots. There were a series of circles superimposed within the upper and lower halves of the tree. Nine above, two that intersected each other in the middle, and nine below.

  “What’s that?” I asked.