Schlumm tapped the keys. His knowledge of jukeboxes had never been put into practice. He amassed doubts and regrets, suspecting that his inexperience might play tricks on him, but not wanting to lose face in front of Puffky. There was the sound of the current inside the loudspeaker, but no voice, phonocopied or otherwise, chose to reveal itself. For several minutes Schlumm fidgeted above the keypad and waited. The minutes remained infertile.
“You have to put a coin into the slot,” Puffky suggested.
“What kind of coin?” Schlumm was dismayed.
“A dollar,” said Puffky.
Schlumm frisked himself. The sum seemed enormous to him. His hands could be heard reluctantly rifling or pretending to rifle through his savings or pockets.
“The money-box isn’t locked,” Puffky stated to console him.
Schlumm was muttering indecisively to himself, but, after fiddling with the fabrics and envelopes covering him for a while, he complied.
“Your dollar is just to trigger the mechanism,” Puffky concluded. “Don’t worry, Schlumm, you can get it back at the end.”
“What end?” said Schlumm. “Listen, Puffky, don’t take me for an imbecile. I know for a fact that I just lost my only dollar.”
“You had to spend it sooner or later,” Puffky remarked.
“Shut up,” Schlumm snapped. “It’s starting.”
In the bowels, several gears had juddered. Galvanized by the dropping of the dollar, the membranes were now transmitting punctured bladder sounds and sweeping sounds. It was hot, stuffy, and dark.
“What if I squatted back down?” Schlumm asked no one in particular.
And, without waiting for an answer, he turned to Puffky.
“It’s stuffy down there,” he explained.
The jukebox grumbled the start of an inflammatory duet, then stopped and made noises like ruminations. The static contained devastated and almost-human nasals. Little by little, one could wrest from this phonetic paste elements that, in a sense, might claim to have some meaning. This blended with lingering precellar odors, with some kind of molded or trampled memorial clay, with remainders of dreams experienced on the surface world or in the cellar, another time, or elsewhere, and by whom unknown. Those kinds of recent or distant adventures.
There was suddenly an announcement from the loudspeakers.
By Johannes Schlumm, the dynaminister, the machine said. Sword cast for the bread.
“Short mass for the dead,” Puffky translated.
“Oh,” said Schlumm. “It’s like that.”
“Yes,” Puffky confirmed. “They talk in crypt language.”
“Are they Tibetans?” Schlumm asked.
“I doubt it,” said Puffky. “This isn’t their kind of thing.”
At that moment, the machine specified that the mass could be performed for any occasion, throughout the entire migration, with immediate benefit for the male or female deceased.
“They’re lying,” Puffky muttered. “You very quickly lose the ability to listen. There you are, unmoving, deaf to admonitions, when there are any. You’ve stopped thinking. You float open-mouthed under the soot, as if you were completely detached from your fate. You’re not interested in the past or future.”
“Nice program,” Schlumm commented, then shut up.
Puffky didn’t add anything more.
The machine continued palavering. It explained that it was first going to play the Introit. Then, there was only a sputtering, a few pulverulences. A blast of air caterwauled inside the pipes and nothing formed from their opening, neither melody nor prate.
“This thing is broken,” said Schlumm.
“No,” said Puffky. “The silence is part of the Introit.”
“I still want to speed it up,” Schlumm said irritably. “How do you do that?”
“Like you did with me,” said Puffky.
Schlumm heavily reared back on his lower membranes, then walked over to the machine and stared at it while clenching his jaws. Then he began kicking it so it would scream out some text. Fluffy curls of dust drifted across the Plexiglas slopes and bounced off, blemishing Schlumm’s shoes. The neon lights were not holding up well to the shocks. Their purple sparkled for a moment, then weakened.
While Schlumm was soliloquizing in its company, the machine engaged its modest defense system, spitting out a fetid cloud meant to frighten off possible assailants. The gears, in their distress, eructated into the mucus membranes the miasmas of prisons and medieval dictatorships. If the attacker had had enough energy to reflect, he would have noticed the threat, he would have compared this effluvia to what men and women had inhaled long ago, when day and night they slumbered in hell, in camp barracks or subterranean pits, and maybe he would have moved away. But nothing stirred in Schlumm’s memory. He beat the machine for a while with the bruising extremities of his limbs and makeshift weapons, such as his scarf, or fistfuls of compacted soot, or filaments of flesh mixed with a bit of earth or bone.
By now, most of the lamps had given up the ghost. It was getting even darker. Everyone was perspiring. Schlumm’s monastic robe, the traditional rags covering his body, could have been wrung like a washcloth. Under the attacks, the machine stood like a humble, substanceless block.
Time passed, then came a moment when Schlumm had already finished his dance. He was no longer moving about or frothing. He was rasping fewer commands that Puffky, though not far away, had trouble hearing.
“Deliver your message,” Schlumm was saying. “Talk. I know you can talk.”
He was tottering over the demolished keypad.
“Come out with what you’re thinking,” he was insisting. “Or else, I’ll. .”
Information on the external worlds, the machine decided.
“Oh,” Schlumm commented. “It’s about time.”
Advice for the crossing of observable darknesses, the machine squawked.
“Good,” said Schlumm, delighted. “Here we go. It took some time, but here we go.”
“You’ll see, we won’t get far,” Puffky warned, then sniffed, like a connoisseur.
“Don’t try to influence me,” Schlumm said indignantly. “I want to judge for myself, without anyone else.”
He returned to his place beside Puffky, his posterior sinking two-thirds of the way into a friable and silky heap, which was like a chair made of friable silk.
Lesson twenty-eight, the machine whined.
“Oh, no luck,” Schlumm groused. “Looks like we missed the start of class.”
“We’ll miss the end too,” Puffky prophesized.
“Oh,” said Schlumm.
By Bogdan Schlumm, the desperadoboist, the machine continued. Lesson on deviousness.
“What the,” said Schlumm.
“Shh,” intimated Puffky.
. . Being a vegetable among vegetables. Waiting. Especially that, waiting. Seeing the why of the drizzle or the watering can. Feeling growth, looking for the why of the apple scabs. Not relying on the moon for light. Respecting conformity, not breaking anything, but understanding your roots. Being thus, a rebellious vegetable, dangerous in the humid night. Blocked in every direction slyly cursing. Like in mud sleeping, but not sleeping. Quietly following the movements of the gardener and his spade. Always imagining that you will escape the blade and, at the first opportunity, acting by surprise and swiftly. Suddenly waiting no longer. Suddenly unmuzzling yourself from the earth. Snatching the gardener, splitting him with a violent incantation. Destroying him at the top of your voice. Roaring from your rootlets, splitting and destroying him.