After I finished reading the five completed stories and the notes-cum-journal or confession relating to a sixth tale, I left the coffee shop, eager not to allow even the faintest touch of the approaching dawn to catch me sitting in that corner booth, a circumstance that I always found intensely depressing for some reason. I followed my usual course of backstreets and alleys home, pausing every so often to admire the suggestive glow in the window of a little store or the network of sagging wires that was everywhere strung above me, the power surging within them seeming to pull me along and put each of my steps in place. This was indeed a sideshow town in every way, peculiar and ridiculous in its essence, though no more so than any other place. I think that my coffee-shop companion might at one time have had a profound appreciation for this state of affairs but had somehow lost it. In the end it seemed that he could not attain even an attitude of resignation, let alone the strength to let himself be carried along by the immanent and absolute realities, the great inescapable matters which he had been privileged to glimpse, so to speak, at the bottom of a dim and empty stairwell.
I was almost home when I heard a commotion in a pile of debris beneath the silvery-blue luminescence of a streetlight in an alley. Looking deep into the mound of empty paint cans, bicycle wheels stripped of their tires, rusty curtain rods, and the like, I saw the little creature. It was something that might have come from a jar in a museum exhibit or a carnival sideshow. What I most clearly remember is the impression made on me by its pale gray eyes, which I had already guessed were a family trait and which had looked at me numerous times from the other side of a corner booth in a coffee shop. These eyes now stared at me accusingly over a bundled stack of old newspapers, those heaping chronicles of the sideshow world. As I began to walk away, the shrunken creature tried to call out to me, but the only sound it managed to make was a coarse raspy noise that briefly echoed down the alley. ‘No,’ he had written in his notes to the unfinished sixth story. ‘I refuse to be a scribe for this show-business phenomenon any longer.’ I, on the other hand, had triumphed over my literary crisis and wanted nothing more than to get back to my desk, my brain practically vibrating with an unwonted energy in spite of passing another night without any sleep.
The Clown Puppet
It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense. As long as I can remember, every incident and every impulse of my existence has served only to perpetrate one episode after another of conspicuous nonsense, each completely outrageous in its nonsensicality. Considered from whatever point of view — intimately close, infinitely remote, or any position in between — the whole thing has always seemed to be nothing more than some freak accident occurring at a painfully slow rate of speed. At times I have been rendered breathless by the impeccable chaoticism, the absolutely perfect nonsense of some spectacle taking place outside myself, or, on the other hand, some spectacle of equally senseless outrageousness taking place within me. Images of densely twisted shapes and lines arise in my brain. Scribbles of a mentally deranged epileptic, I have often said to myself. If I may allow any exception to the outrageously nonsensical condition I have described — and I will allow none — this single exception would involve those visits which I experienced at scattered intervals throughout my existence, and especially one particular visit that took place in Mr Vizniak’s medicine shop.
I was stationed behind the counter at Mr Vizniak’s modest establishment very late one night. At that hour there was practically no business at all, none really, given the backstreet location of the shop and its closet-like dimensions, as well as the fact that I kept the place in almost complete darkness both outside and inside. Mr Vizniak lived in a small apartment above the medicine shop, and he gave me permission to keep the place open or close it up as I liked after a certain hour. It seemed that he knew that being stationed behind the counter of his medicine shop at all hours of the night, and in almost complete darkness except for a few lighting fixtures on the walls, provided my mind with some distraction from the outrageous nonsense which might otherwise occupy it. Later events more or less proved that Mr Vizniak indeed possessed a special knowledge and that there existed, in fact, a peculiar sympathy between the old man and myself. Since Mr Vizniak’s shop was located on an obscure backstreet, the neighborhood outside was profoundly inactive during the later hours of the night. And since most of the streetlamps in the neighborhood were either broken or defective in some way, the only thing I could see through the small front window of the shop was the neon lettering in the window of the meat store directly across the street. These pale neon letters remained lit throughout the night in the window of the meat store, spelling out three words: beef, pork, goat. Sometimes I would stare at these words and contemplate them until my head became so full of meat nonsense, of beef and pork and goat nonsense, that I had to turn away and find something to occupy myself in the back room of the medicine shop, where there were no windows and thus no possibility of meat-store visions. But once I was in the back room I would become preoccupied with all the medicines which were stored there, all the bottles and jars and boxes upon boxes stacked from floor to ceiling in an extremely cramped area. I had learned quite a bit about these medicines from Mr Vizniak, although I did not have a license to prepare and dispense them to customers without his supervision. I knew which medicines could be used to most easily cause death in someone who had ingested them in the proper amount and proper manner. Thus, whenever I went into the back room to relieve my mind from the meat nonsense brought on by excessive contemplation of the beef-pork-and-goat store, I almost immediately became preoccupied with fatal medicines; in other words, I would then become obsessed with death nonsense, which is one of the worst and most outrageous forms of all nonsense. Usually I would end up retreating to the small lavatory in the back room, where I could collect myself and clear my head before returning to my station behind the counter of Mr Vizniak’s medicine shop.
It was there — behind the medicine shop counter, that is — that I experienced one of those visits, which I might have allowed as the sole exception to the intensely outrageous nonsense of my existence, but which in fact, I must say, were the nadir of the nonsensical. This was my medicine-shop visit, so called because I have always experienced only a single visitation in any given place — after which I begin looking for a new situation, however similar it may actually be to my old one. Each of my situations prior to Mr Vizniak’s medicine shop was essentially a medicine-shop situation, whether it was a situation working as a night watchman who patrolled some desolate property, or a situation as a groundskeeper for a cemetery in some remote town, or a situation in which I spent endless gray afternoons sitting in a useless library or shuffling up and down the cloisters of a useless monastery. All of them were essentially medicine-shop situations, and each of them sooner or later involved a visit — either a monastery visit or a library visit, a cemetery visit or a visit while I was delivering packages from one part of town to another in the dead of the night. At the same time there were certain aspects to the medicine-shop visit that were unlike any of the other visits, certain new and unprecedented elements which made this visit unique.