Memoirs Found in a Bathtub Read online

  “Confusion to the enemy!”

  “Prosit!”

  “Long live the Archduke!”

  “Skoal!” barked the chorus. I felt sorry for the young man; they were out to get him drunk, constantly filling his glass! The heavy one puffed up and turned purple, looked like he was ready to burst—only the flabby white neck didn’t seem to match the rest of him. He had something to say, so he hurled a bottle to the floor to get everyone’s attention, jumped up on a chair—but couldn’t speak, gagged on his own laughter, waved his arms frantically for us to wait, then finally managed to shout:

  “Riddles!!”

  “Riddles! Riddles! Who’s first?”

  Dolt sang:

  Clouds so dark, snow so white,

  No moon up in the sky.

  Hug me, kiss me, stay the night,

  Oh, my darling spy!…

  “Gentlemen! Here’s number one! Who—who saw the instructions?”

  A gale of laughter greeted the question. I shuddered as I watched the shaking bellies, the open mouths—the cremator grabbed the young man and they laughed until they cried. Again the glasses came together in a circle above the table and clinked. The cremator, like one possessed, imprinted passionate kisses upon the air, and Dolt gargled vodka—I noticed a little dent in his nose where the rim of the glass had hit it—another false nose. Not that I cared. The heavy one took off his pajama top and wiped his hairy armpits with it—the sweat trickled down his flabby body—and he unbuttoned his false ears.

  “Oh, give me a peek and some secrets to leak,” sang Dolt and the young man in harmony. “Where the spies and the counterspies play.” The cremator joined in, off key:

  “Where treason is heard an encouraging word—and there’s plenty of men to betray!”

  “Gentlemen! Riddle number two! What is marriage?” The heavy one shaked like a hairy woman. “Marriage is the smallest espionage unit,” he said, but nobody was listening.

  Red, screaming faces whirled around me. Was Dolt giving the cremator a sign by wiggling his ears? Impossible, they were both too drunk. Suddenly Sempriaq grabbed someone else’s glass, gulped it down and smashed it on the floor. Then he stood up. Vodka and drool dribbled off his red whiskers.

  “Gentlemen!” they yelled. “Pay attention! Look at that bearing, gentlemen! He needs a promotion!”

  “Silence!” the cremator bawled, deathly pale. He reeled and clutched the table for support, cleared his throat, bared his squirrel-like teeth and broke into tears, crying:

  “Alas, my youth! My sacred childhood! The haunts where I was wont to play! Whither have they fled? And wherefore? Where are the snows of yesteryear? Must all things piss away—that is, pass away?”

  “Oh, shut up!” snapped Dolt. He looked the young man over very carefully, took out another full bottle and hissed:

  “Don’t you listen to him!”

  And he put the bottle to the young man’s lips and pulled back the head, forcing him to drink.

  The gurgle of the emptying bottle was the only sound in the room. The cremator squinted, cleared his throat and continued:

  “Am I not my left hand’s keeper? Forty days and nights? My neighbor’s ass, and much cattle? Behold, I stand before you, violated by existence…”

  He stopped.

  The young man fell limp into Dolt’s arms. Dolt removed the empty bottle and said in a perfectly sober voice:

  “That’ll do.”

  “H’m,” the heavy one grunted, bending over the young man and pushing the eyelids back with a thumb. Evidently satisfied, he let the body drop. It fell with a thud and rolled under the table, where it was soon snoring away.

  The cremator took a seat, mopped his brow with a handkerchief, adjusted his mustache, and the others too began to stir themselves…

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. Everything was coming off: noses, eyebrows, wrinkles, birthmarks, they were all placed neatly on saucers. Stranger yet, the eyes cleared, the expressions grew more intelligent, the faces lost that dissipated office look. The tall, emaciated one (though actually, his cheeks were already filling out) pulled up a chair, gave a worldly smile, and said:

  “Do forgive us this masquerade. An extremely unpleasant business, to be sure—yet quite unavoidable. Force majeure. Believe me when I tell you that it doesn’t come easily to us. If a man imitates a pig, some of the piggishness is bound to rub off on him.”

  “Then he can unpig himself afterwards!” the cremator retorted from across the table, looking at his own hands with distaste.

  I was speechless.

  The tall one (he was shorter now) leaned against my chair. The cuff of an elegant dress shirt showed from under his pajama sleeve.

  “The mire and the spire,” he mused, “the eternal rhythm of history, the pendulum above the abyss…”

  He raised his head.

  “Now you can be our guest in earnest, though I fear our company might prove a bit too academic for your liking… We do tend to get abstruse at times…”

  “What?” I blurted, not yet over this incredible transformation.

  “Well, you know, we’re all professors here. That’s Professor Deluge,” he pointed to the heavy one, who was dragging the young man out from under the table and trying, with difficulty, to prop him up against the wall. The trainee was apparently a high-ranking officer, to judge from the uniform that now showed under his pajamas.

  “Deluge holds a chair in Scoposcopy.”

  “Scoposcopy?”

  “Also, he’s an accomplished cabalist and countercollaborationist. It was Deluge who doctored half the stars in the Galaxy.”

  “Dolt! That’s a military secret!” cried the heavy professor in mock dismay. He straightened Ms clothes, reached for a glass of water and sprinkled some on his bald head.

  “A secret? Now?” grinned Dolt.

  “You’re sure he’s unconscious?” asked the cremator, his face in his hands, apparently fighting the effects of the alcohol he’d consumed.

  “That’s right, he snores too loud for such a young man,” I said, realizing only now that all along they had been out to drink the young officer (disguised as a trainee) under the table.

  “Young man? Why, he’s old enough to be your father,” snorted the heavy professor as he patted his bald head dry.

  “You can believe Deluge, he’s an old hand at this,” Dolt reassured me—and lifted a comer of the tablecloth to let me see that the scholar in question discontinued below the waist.

  “Dummy legs,” he explained. “Hollow, of course. On occasions like these, eminently practical…”

  “So you’re all … professors?” I mumbled, unfortunately not completely sober.

  “With the possible exception of our colleague the cremator. But then, his discipline is interdepartmental,” said Dolt. “As director of our cadaveristics program and custodian—custodia eius cremationi similis—he holds a seat in the Faculty Senate.”

  “Then Mr. Sempriaq really is a cremator? I thought—”

  “A cover? No. But you seem to be catching on. Yes,” he said, nodding in the direction of the snoring, “it’s hard work to lull suspicions.”

  “You shouldn’t complain,” said the heavy professor. “We didn’t do at all badly this time. Often one has to stay up all night spinning yams of bygone spies, plots of yore, operatives of old when finks were bold, and so forth and so on, then all about ultraspies and infrareds, the latest gadgets and gags, caches and tags—you talk yourself blue in the face before they’re properly stupefied. And in winter, there’s a log crackling on the fire and we sit around and sing coded carols, and there’s always a draft—and I always catch a cold.”

  He sighed.

  “Ah, yes,” said the cremator, and he sang with squirrel-like sarcasm:

  “Deck the halls with mikes and wiretaps, fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!”

  “No more, Gatekeeper. I can’t stand it!” cried Professor Deluge, shuddering.

  “Gatekeeper?” I asked.

&nbs
p; “You are surprised we call him Gatekeeper?” said Dolt. “Professors we may be, but we have our nicknames too, our collegiate monikers… Deluge here was christened ‘Proteus’ by his fraternity. ‘Gatekeeper’ … well, in the sense that he guards the gate to the Building, the door with only one side, the side facing us…”

  That was unclear, but I didn’t dare question him further. So to ask something, I asked:

  “And what is your field, Professor?”

  “Nanosemy, and I teach a seminar on pseudosemeiology. Also, I dabble in decerebration and defecation—trepans and bedpans, you know—just a hobby.”

  “Such modesty,” said Professor Deluge. “I’ll have you know that our Professor Dolt is the world’s greatest authority on blackmail, and that his work, The Anatomy of Treason, is an absolute must for anyone planning to betray his country. But enough of this, talking makes the throat dry—nunc est bibendum!”

  And he uncorked a bottle.

  “You mean,” I said, thoroughly confused, “we’re going to drink again?”

  “Good Lord man, why else are we here?”

  “But … we’ve already had so much…”

  “That drinking doesn’t count, it was only for appearances,” the heavy professor patiently explained. “Anyhow, we’re not drinking cheap vodka and raw wine, but the best cognac, brandy, all vintage stuff.”

  “Well, I suppose…”

  The bottle made its way around the table; its noble contents, ceremoniously sniffed and sipped, soon restored us, lifted our spirits, softened the memory of our recent trials. From the ensuing conversation I learned that Professor Dolt had more than a passing interest in Ancient Greece.

  “A change of pace?” I inquired.

  “Whatever do you mean? Why, the Trojan Horse marked the birth of cryptoequestrianism! And think of the unmasking of Circe by Odysseus! Or the musical sabotage of the sirens! And the omens, the riddles, the oracles—or take Zeus’s infiltration in the guise of a swan!”

  “Apropos,” Sempriaq interrupted, “do you know the opera Cadaveria Rusticana?”

  “Hellenic studies, a veritable gold mine!” Dolt continued, ignoring the cremator.

  “Undoubtedly,” I agreed. “But … may I ask, Professor, exactly what the field you mentioned—Nanosemy, was it?—what it deals with?…”

  “Of course you may. Nanosemy, yes. Consider first: what is our earthly existence but a neverending culling of intelligence? We seek to discover Nature’s secrets. In Rome they had but one name for the scholar-explorer and the scout-agent: speculator. And indeed, the scientist is a spy par excellence and, for that matter, par force. He is Humanity’s Plant in the Great Lap of Existence!”

  He filled my glass.

  “Yes, spying is man’s qualitas occulta, and has been from earliest times. In the Middle Ages we have spyeries, espyals… To spy, spionieren, spitzeln, espionner, skopiaō, szpiegować, špijunirati… Treason, tresun, treysoun, tradere, trahison… Mata Hari, Dreyfus, Delilah, Wallenstein… Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.—Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders.—A treason and a stratagem.—I come no Spie with purpose to explore the secrets of your Realm.—We come not single spies, but in battalions.—This blessed plot… But I digress… Where were we? My field, yes. What does it mean? Meaning. And so we enter the realm of semantics. One must tread carefully here! Consider: from earliest times man did little else but assign meanings—to the stones, the skulls, the sun, other people, and the meanings required that he create theories—life after death, totems, cults, all sorts of myths and legends, black bile and yellow bile, love of God and country, being and nothingness—and so it went, the meanings shaped and regulated human life, became its substance, its frame and foundation—but also a fatal limitation and a trap! The meanings, you see, grew obsolete in time, were eventually lost, yet how could the following generations discard their heritage, particularly when so many of their worthy ancestors had been crucified for those nonexistent gods, or had labored so long and mightily over the philosopher’s stone, phlogiston, ectoplasm, the ether? It was considered that this layering of new meanings upon old was a natural, organic process, a semantic evolution—yet observe how a phrase like ‘great discovery’ is bled of sense, devalued, made common coin, until now we give it freely to the latest model of bomb… But do have some more cognac.”

  And he filled my glass.

  “And so,” continued Dolt with a thoughtful smile, adjusting his nose. “Where does this lead us? Demisemiotics! It’s quite simple, really, the taking away of meaning…”

  “Oh?” I said, then bit my lip, ashamed of my own ignorance. He took no notice.

  “Yes, meaning must be disposed of!” he said heatedly. “History has crippled us long enough with its endless explanations, ratiocinations, mystifications! In my work, we do not simply falsify atoms and doctor the stars—we proceed very slowly, methodically, with the utmost care, to deprive everything, absolutely everything, of its meaning.”

  “But isn’t that really—a kind of destruction?”

  He gave me a sharp look. The others whispered and fell silent. The old officer propped up against the wall continued to snore.

  “An interesting observation. Destruction, you say? Consider: when you create something, anything, a rocket or a new fork, there are always so many problems, doubts, complications! But if you destroy (let’s use that inaccurate term for the sake of argument), whatever else one may say about it, it is unquestionably clean and simple.”

  “So you advocate destruction?” I asked, unable to suppress an idiotic grin.

  “Must be the cognac,” he said, refilling my glass with a smile. We drank.

  “Besides, we aren’t even here,” he added.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Have you any idea of the mathematical probabilities involved for any given chunk of matter in the universe to be eligible for participation in the biosphere, whether as a leaf, a sausage, or even drinkable water? Or breathable air? The odds are about a quadrillion to one against it! Our universe is a prodigiously lifeless place. One particle in a quadrillion may enter into the life cycle, the procession of birth and death, growth and decay—consider what a rare event that must be. And now I ask you to consider not the probability of a piece of food, or of a drop of water, or of a breath of air—but the probability of an embryo! Take the ratio of the mass of the universe—the burnt-out suns, the frozen planets, those cosmic garbage dumps we call nebulae, that enormous cloaca of dust and rubble and noxious gas we think of as the Milky Way, all that thermonuclear fermentation, that swirling of debris—take the ratio of that total mass to the mass of a human body; there you have your probability for a chunk of matter, equal in weight to a man, to be a man—and that probability is negligible!”

  “Negligible?” I said.

  “In other words, you and I, all of us in this room, statistically we can’t exist, we aren’t really here…”

  “What?” I blinked, trying to clear my vision.

  “We aren’t here,” repeated Dolt, and burst out laughing with the others.

  It was a joke, of course, one of those clever scientific jokes. It didn’t strike me as particularly funny, but I laughed to be polite.

  The empty bottles disappeared and full ones took their place.

  I was attentive as the scholars conversed, but understood less and less. I had had too much to drink. Someone, possibly the cremator, held forth on the death agony as a test of strength. Professor Deluge engaged Professor Dolt in a debate on dementogeny and psychophagia—or something like that—then they talked of recent breakthroughs, the Machina Mistificatrix, and my head kept nodding no matter how hard I tried to sit up straight, and the voices seemed to come from a great distance.

  “Is he ready?” someone asked. I tried to see who it was, but everything kept revolving—was I really that drunk?—and then I found I couldn’t even think, someone was doing it for me. I floated in a cloud of tiny sparks, latched on
to the table and laid my burning face on it, like a dog.

  Before me was the slender stem of a wineglass, the dainty leg of an elegant goblet, a delicate crystal thigh… I told her I would always be true, I wept in gratitude, and overhead they drank and held forth—truly, those caps and gowns did hold their liquor well!

  Then there was nothing, and when I came to, my throbbing head still rested on the table. There were crumbs on my nose. I heard voices.

  “The universe, I betrayed the universe … mea culpa, I confess it…”

  “All right, that’s enough.”

  “Those were my orders, my orders…”

  “Come on, have a glass of water.”

  “Is he asleep?” someone asked.

  “Don’t worry, he’s out cold.”

  But there was dead silence when I stirred and opened my eyes. Nothing had changed. The old officer was still snoring away in a comer. Bottles and faces swam before my eyes.

  “Silentium, gentlemen!”

  “Gaudeamus Isidor!”

  “Nunc est Gaudium atque Bibendum!” came a cry from far away.

  “There’s no difference,” I thought. “It’s the same as before, except in Latin.”

  “Gentlemen!” shouted Dolt. “Suaviter in re, fortiter in modo… Spectator debet esse elegans, penetrans et bidexter… Vivant omnes virgines, gentlemen! Vive la Maison! Cheers!”

  Everything whirled around, red things, sweaty things, white things, heavy things… Where before they had chortled, “The ladies! Oo-la-la!” now it was “Frivolitas in duo corpore, Venus Invigilatrix,” and more of the same. I tried to ask them why, but no one would listen to me. They jumped on their chairs, delivered speeches, sat down again, sang, danced in a circle. “We did that before!” I protested, but they laughed and pulled me along. “Toom-ba-toom-ba-toom-ba-ba!” boomed the heavy one, and we all joined hands and pranced and stamped our way into an enormous hall. A cold draft from somewhere sobered me up a little, and I looked around.

  A kind of Theatrum Anatomicum, a lecture hall with rising tiers of chairs, and in the center a podium, lectern, blackboards, erasers, chalk, shelves of specimens preserved in alcohol, and on the table empty jars, waiting to be filled—so this was where the Commander in Chief got his supply! A gentleman in black approached our dancing group. The cremator ground to a halt and blew out air like an old locomotive; I uncoupled my car from the train and waited to see what would happen next.