Memoirs Found in a Bathtub Read online

  “Ah! If it isn’t Professor Schnuffel! Welcome, welcome, beloved colleague!” cried Deluge, and his greeting echoed and reechoed. The others also stopped their prancing to bow and shake his hand. The new professor looked quite venerable in his gray hair and tails.

  “Professor Shuffle! Kindly enlighten us on this matter of bottom priority, to wit, what in the hell is it?” bellowed Dolt and, to accentuate his lack of respect, hopped on one leg.

  “The brain, membra dissecta,” replied the old man in black. And indeed, there on the table were large, plaster sections of the human brain, all carefully mounted and labeled, resembling marble viscera, or perhaps a modern sculptor’s madness. The professor brushed one with a feather duster.

  “The brain?!” Dolt shrieked with glee. “Gentlemen! I give you our pride and joy—the brain!” He lifted his glass. “A toast that is bacchic, bucolic, and anacoluthic!”

  He filled our glasses, then turned and read the labels like a litany:

  “O, gyrus fornicatus!” he intoned, and the others took up the chorus, howling with laughter.

  “O, tuber cinerum! O, striatum! O, corpora quadrigemina, four rounded bodies!”

  “Rounded bodies!” they roared with delight. The old man in the tuxedo continued his dusting as if nothing had happened.

  “O, sella turcica! Chiasma opticum! Mammillary body!” chanted Dolt.

  “Mammillary body!” yelled the cremator.

  “O, hippocampus! Pons Varolii! O, fissure of Rolando!”

  “Dura mater, pia mater, alma mater! And gentlemen, let us not forget mater hari!”

  “Careful, there’s formaldehyde,” cautioned Professor Schnuffel or Shuffle.

  “Formol—formalin—formaldehyde!”

  They joined hands and dragged the venerable anatomy professor with them, making him their leader and waving his feather duster about like a banner. I sat in one of the chairs and watched, trying to bring things into focus. Drunken shouts and stamping feet boomed and echoed in the dark, and the domed ceiling looked down on us like a monstrous eye.

  On a metal stand next to me was a skeleton, stooped and toothless, in an attitude of somber resignation. The left hand was short one finger—I gasped, I looked closer. Something glittered, dangling from a rib … gold spectacles…

  Was this, then, his final destination? A display for medical students? And was this to be our third, our final meeting? And was it all to end like this?…

  “Catch, Gatekeeper!” cried Dolt. “Haec locus, ubi Troia fuit! Professor Shrapnel! I bestow upon you the Order of the Garter Snake, Denuntiatio Constructiva, the Distinguished Noose of Honor!”

  “Watch out!” hissed the gray anatomist as they recklessly pulled him along, his tails flapping wildly. The warning came too late—they crashed into the shelves and brought everything down, the jars shattered on the floor, the alcohol spilled out and, with it, the matted freaks within…

  The stench of corruption, bottled up for so many years, now billowed out and filled the auditorium. The revelers fled, leaving the old man to his despair, and I followed them back to our room and slammed the door.

  More bottles, corks popping, and an endless pouring and roaring, so I hid in an armchair and gratefully went out with the tide, wondering only how one could put on gold spectacles if there were no ears left. Overcome with grief, I sank beneath the waves…

  Suddenly an apparition got in my way, pale, dripping sweat, unusually long.

  “What a long face you have, Professor,” I said, enunciating each syllable with care.

  The table made a good pillow. But Dolt smiled a wicked, left-handed smile and whispered:

  “Only a worm can play the worm…”

  “What a long face,” I whispered in alarm.

  “Never mind the face. You know what I am?”

  “Certainly… Professor Dolt, sabotage…”

  “No, that’s Deluge… My mission is to—neutralize—Him.”

  I tried to sit up but couldn’t.

  “What?”

  “He must be put out of action.”

  “Deluge?”

  “Not Deluge—Him, you know, the One who—rested on the seventh day.” And the left side smiled again. The right remained sad.

  “You’re joking.”

  “Not at all. We’ve checked … up there, in the heavens above … we have our sources of information, you know.”

  “Of course,” I muttered. “Professor?”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell me, what’s a triple?”

  He gave me a hug and breathed alcohol in my face.

  “I’ll tell you. You’re young, but you’re one of us, and I’m one of us, so I’ll tell you. Everything. Now, say someone’s one of us … but he’s also—you know—you can tell, right?”

  “He’s not—one of us,” I said.

  “Right! You can tell! But sometimes—you can’t tell. You think someone’s one of us, but they got to him and then he wasn’t any more—and then we got to him, and he was—but he still has to look like he isn’t, that is, like he only looks like he is! But they get wise to him and—now he isn’t again, but he has to look like he isn’t—or we’ll get wise—and that’s a triple!”

  “Of course,” I replied. “And a quadruple’s the same, only more.”

  “Exactly! Now if you like, I’ll swear you in.”

  “You?”

  “Me.”

  “But you’re a professor!”

  “So? I also swear in agents.”

  “For which side?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Well…”

  “You’re not so dumb as you look. You’ll go far.” He chucked me under the chin like a fond father. How very old he looked! And so suddenly!

  “And you’re not even ticklish,” he said with an approving wink. “Now tell me, what’s galactoplexia?”

  “Galactoplexia?”

  “Give up? The end of the world! Ha!”

  Could it be that under the influence of alcohol, the crude office-clerk element was winning out over the professorial? My head ached at the thought. Dolt stared at me with his icicle eyes.

  Somebody was scratching my leg. The cremator surfaced from under the tablecloth, climbed onto my knees and said:

  “How sweet it is to hear old friends third-degree each other … like sniffing a rose in spring … exchanging innocent lies…”

  He wrapped his arms around my neck and whispered:

  “Friend. Long-lost brother. Name it, it’s yours, whatever you want, I’ll give you the world…”

  “Professor, please!” I said, struggling with him. He hung on me like a sack of potatoes and tried to kiss me, pricking my cheeks with his stubby whiskers until they pulled him off and he staggered back—holding up a plate.

  A plate? Wait! I racked my brains. Yes, there was something—plates! Someone mentioned plates! But who, and what did it mean?

  There was a great commotion, a crowd of people jumped up and ran about: in the middle of the room sat the heavy professor, rocked by violent hiccups, a wet rag on his bald head. The hiccups made a curious counterpoint with the snoring from the corner.

  “Scare him! Frighten him!”

  We gathered in a circle around him. I swayed on rubber legs. He looked at us, confused, gesturing for help—he couldn’t speak for the hiccups—the eyes bulged hideously, and the chair creaked beneath him, so powerful were the spasms.

  “He’s signaling!” hissed the cremator, listening closely and holding his plate high in the air. “Hear it?”

  “No! N-o!” the heavy one protested, but his protest was lost in a veritable storm of hiccups.

  “Signaling, eh?” Dolt said grimly and squeezed my hand.

  “No, I swear!!”

  “Count them!” roared the multitude.

  We counted the hiccups in ominous chorus:

  “Eleven, twelve, thirteen.”

  “Traitor!” hurled the cremator, and pointed an accusing finger.

>   The heavy one turned a deep purple, the sweat poured down his face, he trembled…

  “Fourteen, fifteen…”

  I waited, my fingers numb in Dolt’s iron grip. The heavy one held his breath, bit his fist—but the hiccup came and knocked him off his chair.

  “Six-”

  He shuddered, coughed, then lay still. Finally the swollen eyelids flickered open and peace reigned once more on that flabby face.

  “Thanks,” he whispered. “Thanks.”

  And we returned to the table as if nothing had happened. I was still drank, but in a different way: everything was free and easy, my movements, my speech, and the part of me that had always watched and stood guard—that part was gone now, and I greeted its disappearance with gay abandon.

  Before I knew it, Dolt was lecturing me on the nature of the Building’s nature. He sang this song:

  Hey, the Building, hey!

  What makes the Building stay?

  The Antibuilding makes it stay!

  Hey!

  Then he spoke of sodomystics and gomorrhoids. I decided to ignore the plate which the cremator was waving at me from across the room.

  “I see it!” I yelled in defiance. “It’s a plate! But I’ll do what I want! I don’t care! I’m free as a bird!”

  “Free as a bird!” said Dolt, patting my knee with a left-handed laugh. He inquired into my experiences as a spy, asked how the Building was treating me, and so on. I talked.

  “And what happened then?” he asked, showing interest.

  I told him everything—in the strictest confidence, since I still wasn’t sure of the others. The priest, Dolt said, was an abbé provocateur; and of the little old man in the gold spectacles he had this to say:

  “Serves him right. He completely lost his head in the coffin sequence.”

  Sempriaq left the table and went to talk something over with the heavy one, who still sat in the middle of the room and was pouring water on his head.

  “A possible conspiracy,” I said to Dolt, pointing them out.

  “Pish tush,” he said. “Let’s get back to you. What did the doctor say?”

  When he heard the rest of my story, he sighed, solemnly shook my hand, and said:

  “You are distraught. But you needn’t be, you needn’t be… Look at me: roaring drunk. Positively. Sober, it’s a different story, but now—my heart is open to you. You’re one of us, I’m one of us… Do you know what I am? You don’t know what I am.”

  “You told me, you—”

  “I didn’t tell you. Now I’ll tell you. Yes. Plenipotentiary of Transcendental Affairs. But that’s nothing. Now I’ll tell you the truth: la Maison c’est moi. I am the Building. Triples, quadruples, quintuples—that’s nothing, mere child’s play. Hide-and-seek. Now here’s the Building. And here’s the Antibuilding. Two colossi. Since the world began. And everyone, you understand, has been approached by now. The Building consists entirely of enemy agents; the Antibuilding is ours, down to the last man!”

  “Of course,” I said, trying desperately not to believe this unbelievable revelation.

  “Everyone’s a plant, infiltration is complete, complete and mutual—ours pretend to be ours, theirs theirs—so everything remains the same!”

  “The same?”

  “The Building stands firm by virtue of the fact that ours became theirs over a span of many years, gradually, plant by plant, keeping the structure, the system intact. Everything was carefully preserved: ranks, promotions, decorations, unmaskings, regulations, security precautions, surveillance, office procedures and routines, seals and signatures, everything in triplicate—and so by the grace of Almighty Bureaucracy did the Building remain true to itself, keep the faith, and turn betrayal to unswerving loyalty!!”

  “Amazing!” I exclaimed, all goose flesh.

  “But true, my boy, but true. Consider that the business of entrapment, blackmail, planting an agent, requires the utmost security, absolute secrecy, otherwise you risk exposure and the game is up. Hence, only one of theirs there knows about a given one of theirs here, and vice versa. Also, since his superiors and subordinates think he’s one of ours, he must report for work like everyone else, take and give orders, track down enemy agents in earnest and neutralize them. Thus he does the Building’s work. And if in the line of duty he should happen to steal or photograph a few secret documents, no harm is done: the information goes there, to the Antibuilding, into the hands of our people.”

  “And vice versa?” I whispered, awed by the vision of treachery on such a scale.

  “Yes, unfortunately. Clever of you to observe that.”

  “And the shooting in the hall? And the suicides?” My question must have hit a nerve—his face clouded over, his mouth gave a left-handed twitch.

  “There are slip-ups now and then, leaks—and there are quotas to meet. The Building continues to recruit and swear in new agents—it dare not stop—and complications result. For example, a double might unmask a triple that’s really a quadruple. The situation is hardly improved by the recent appearance of sextuples and septuples, overenthusiastic types…”

  “And the spy in the bathroom, what about him?”

  “Who knows? A free lance, perhaps, a maverick, a gentleman of the old school, an unreconstructed liberal, a dreamer, the kind that waits and hopes to seize the Document of documents, the Secret of secrets—single-handed. Idle fancies, since only the collective can achieve anything, and he knows this, and that is why he despairs…”

  “Then what should I do?”

  “Above all, get involved, take sides, don’t slip into the pit of self-pity and escapist fantasies. It’s the little individual, remember, that ends up caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea.”

  The cremator held up two plates. I waved him away.

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “Diversify, dig in, hold out, buy low, sell high, and to thine own self be true.”

  “I see. There’s one other thing—how is it you know so much about the Building if everything is supposed to be so secret? After all, you said that—” But the cremator came up and interrupted me with his plates. “I’m not interested in your plates!” I cried, pushed him away, and turned to Dolt. “I mean, how do you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “You know, what you were just telling me.”

  “I know?”

  “You know, how both camps infiltrated one another, mutually, to the last man, and how the Building was really the Antibuilding and vice versa, and treason wasn’t treason, but loyalty… How did you find all this out?”

  “How?” he said, inspecting his fingernails.

  “I’m asking you!”

  “Me?” He looked up and gave me an icy stare.

  “Yes! How did you—?”

  “How did I what?” The room was silent, too silent.

  “You know … find all this out?”

  “I don’t know,” he said with a sneer, “what you’re talking about.”

  I turned pale, the words stuck in my throat—and I realized, suddenly, that the officer in the comer was no longer snoring, but getting up, stretching, removing his pajamas and straightening his uniform, then walking briskly up to us and saying:

  “Are you prepared to testify that this employee, known under the name of Dolt alias Professor of Nanosemy and Demisemiotics alias The False Statistician alias Screw alias Plauderton, did willfully slander and abuse the Building and did attempt by such slander and abuse to entice you to high treason, lèse maison, asubordination, nonprovocation, unsabotage and null espionage, and that the said Dolt did contrive to ensnare you thereby in his nefarious snares, schemes and coils?”

  I looked around. The heavy one stroked his flabby neck. Dolt fixed his white, expressionless eyes on me. The cremator had turned his back to us and was examining his plates, as if refusing to acknowledge what was taking place.

  “In the name of the Building I call you forth to bear testimony and witness against this man!” sa
id the officer severely.

  Numb, I shook my head. The officer stepped forward, seemed to trip, grabbed me to right himself—and whispered in my ear:

  “Idiot! This is your Mission!”

  Then he stepped back and said, in the same stem tone: “Speak! We are waiting!”

  I looked to the others for help. They looked away. Dolt began to tremble.

  “Yes,” I mumbled.

  “Yes, what?”

  “Well, he said some things…”

  “Treasonous things?”

  “No!! I swear!” screamed Dolt.

  “Silence!” The officer turned to me. “Go on.”

  “Well … he did say that treason … was loyalty…”

  “Treason loyalty?!”

  “In a sense … that is, we were talking in general…”

  “Did he say it or not?!”

  “He did,” I whispered, and after a moment of silence they burst out laughing; the heavy one held his belly and bounced in his chair, Dolt wheezed, and the officer (young again) danced around the table and yelled:

  “He did it! He ratted! He squealed! He sang!”

  “Stool pigeon! Tattletale! Stool pigeon! Tattletale!” they crowed, doubled up with laughter.

  Only the cremator remained aloof, watching the scene with a sardonic smile.

  “Enough!” said Dolt, triumphant. “It’s time for us to go.”

  The heavy one buttoned his collar; the young officer, weary but satisfied, rinsed his mouth out with seltzer. They completely ignored me. I was stunned, speechless. Dolt picked up his briefcase and thermos, threw his suit over his shoulder and strode out, arm in arm with the heavy one.

  The cremator turned around at the door and pointed eloquently at the plates left on the table. This clearly meant: “I gave you the signs! You have only yourself to blame!”

  Only the young man remained, and he was leaving. I stood in his way—he stopped—I clutched his arm.

  “It was all a game, wasn’t it? How could you!”