Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread, Page 20

  As a result, an array of fuming, furious, stoop-shouldered women can always be found standing outside the cordoned-off area. Her eyes downcast, each stands alone from the others, knowing she’s an object of public pity. In German, these women are called Schandwartfreierweiber. A rough translation of which means “women who wait in shame for their men.”

  Within those barricades is Hamburg’s vice district, lined with female prostitutes, many of them amazingly lovely who call to the men strolling past, “Hast ein frage?” Or, “Haben sie ein fragen?” The barriers are to exclude the innocent and the judgmental, specifically respectable women. It’s accepted that the presence of a woman not selling her body would shame those who were, and doesn’t every person deserve some measure of respect? Perhaps no one more so than the women who have so little else.

  It’s an informal arrangement. No law prohibits respectable women from entering the district; however, the custom is that local children, the children of prostitutes, fill male prophylactics with urine. Male children, merely because of the physiology required to fill a sheath with urine. They knot the resulting balloons—warm, stinking, unstable, be they lambskin or rubber—leaving them in rows, placed in locations of strongest sunlight so that the contents will ferment to the peak of foulness. Throwing these noxious bombs, they drench any curious, voyeuristic, or no doubt impatient females who venture within seeking a husband or boyfriend who’s taken leave for too long a time. Yet more interesting is the fact that it’s the bastard male offspring who assume the role of defending the honor of their fallen mothers.

  Awareness of these balloons, so fragile, so rank, so handy, and of the children so excited to throw them, this keeps the Schandwartfreierweiber outside when their men—foreign tourists, people from the countryside—insist on entering “Just for a peek” or “Just for a moment, my dear, I can’t see not taking a look” and are gone for an hour. Two hours. As long as such visits take.

  Every city has such a barrier, tangible or intangible. To preserve the respect of the fallen and the sensitivity of the others. In Amsterdam, the De Wallen. In Madrid, the Calle Montera off the Gran Vía. And it was into such a district of his own city that Felix M—— ventured more times than he’d care to admit, even to himself. Especially to himself. Especially since it was into a similar low haunt that his own father had vanished more than two decades before. And most especially since now Felix M—— had a son of his own, a boy now ten years old.

  Having a child, a son, Felix M—— had thought would settle him and end his wandering habits: his endless circuitous perambulations penetrating certain dives and dens of depravity which are all but unknown and invisible to the general culture. For that which can’t be spoken of does not exist. And these places go unmentioned in any newspaper of record and are therefore undocumented. Nonexistent. Perhaps that is their greatest appeal: the idea that in delving therein one vanishes.

  It was scarcely a lie, the nights he absented himself from his marital bed, telling his wife he’d been summoned into work for an emergency. No, she hardly seemed to notice as he dressed himself in the dark and kissed her good-bye. To her credit, his wife was intelligent and charming. A personage very highly regarded among the circle of their peers. Unlike most women, she was more lovely unclothed than clothed for her body retained the proportions of youth and the sun had never mottled her skin, and for a long time, several years at least, that had been enough.

  Tonight, as every night Felix ventured out, he had but a short commute to get from the world that existed to the one which did not. A carriage ride. Making his way through the dark city, he felt the speed exaggerated, the way one feels walking forward the full length of a train as it travels at fifty miles an hour. Superhuman. That hurtling recklessly forward.

  Quickly was he among the haunts and low places, rubbing elbows with such denizens who did not exist in the comfort of daylight and human industry. Mishaps and history had condemned them, these crippled minds and mangled bodies, and Felix M—— sought as Krafft-Ebing had, to observe them and compile a taxonomy of the circumstances which had so irreparably sunk them so low. A compendium, he considered it, of human failure. An exposé of the despicable society which had robbed him of his father. To that end he equipped himself with a journal and a pen, both inconspicuous, the tools for recording the best bits his eavesdropping might detect. Otherwise, a paltry sum bought sufficient draughts of some stygian black lager to loosen the tongue of even the most-secretive lurker.

  As engineers tested the ductile strength of steel elements, so did Felix strive to locate the breaking point in himself and others. Sought to collect through interviews the events which had landed each man upon the dust heap.

  In the manner of Darwin or Audubon, he sojourned into that wilderness, those uninhabitable habitats, the dank taverns reserved for the occupations of drinking and smoking opium and consorting with those who, too, cultivated self-eradication. In the dim light, the shadowy walls shimmered with great, sparkling mosaics of motallaric cockroaches. Furred vermin of dimorphic sorts traversed the floor on claws, unseen beneath the tables and chairs, on occasion sepaciating themselves upon Felix’s shoes.

  Here he settled, opening his journal to a blank page, and he made ready to harvest the misfortunes of those present. If the perfect words didn’t exist, Felix M—— crafted them. He invented words as if creating tools for entirely new purposes. Because the sounds he heard were not identical to what others heard, he needed something beyond the standardized language that tied every human to the past and reduced every new adventure to merely a slight variation on some earlier episode.

  Bleak and daunting as the scene appeared, it stimulated his mind as did no other. Pressing him from every direction were tales more exciting than any the magazines dared publish, stories enervated with lunatic violence and blackguards brought to no lawful comeuppance. Here were tragedies of hearth and home more cathartic than the saddest work of Dickens or Shakespeare. Here, chaos did not lead to enlightenment. No lessons were learned by these nittoctic wastrels and volmaritary tosspots. More so, on a personal level, it gave Felix M—— great comfort to hear such tales. While his own life as a clerk and husband wasn’t ideal, compared with these, he was a king.

  The book he was penning, no, it was no mere diary. He expected it to attract a vast readership, for not only would it provide valuable lessons regarding perseverance and self-determination, but it would also serve as a balm. A vivid pornography of other people’s misery. Such a tome, bound in Moroccan leather, the pages gilt-edged, it could be pored over by someone seated in a velvet armchair beside a snug parlor fire while sipping port. All those suburban pleasures would the unhappiness of this book render more glorious. The folly within those pages would validate the tedious, timorous lives of bank clerks and shopkeepers.

  The well-off adored scrutinizing those in poverty. The moral craved stories of immorality, more so when those stories were couched in the spirit of social reform. Under a morally unassailable guise such as that, he’d publish the most titillating accounts of base goings-on in whoredom. Their prices and perversions. Although framed as a progressive tract, his chronicle would boast more freaks and aberrations than the combined circus sideshows the world over. The feebleminded. The malformed. Acts of beastly sadism and inhuman humiliation, he would parade brazenly before the reader.

  Buried deeper was his real motive. A secret of which Felix himself was only vaguely aware.

  Herr Nietzsche had only recently declared God to be dead. If Felix succeeded, his expedition would prove otherwise. Exploration, documentation (was he no less an explorer than Mr. Darwin had been?) would prove his theorem.

  Not just a measly record of grim experience, he wanted this to be a proof. An undeniable proof of divinity. In the same manner mathematicians—those brilliant men who could distill all of time and space using a piece of chalk—could solve the riddles of existence with an equation, Felix felt that he might boil the mysteries of the eternal down to a single senten
ce.

  If numbers could explain the physical world, words would explain the invisible one. Felix had staked his life on it. And if history remembered him as an idiot, well, he was only one among billions of people. History could spare one man. All men are doomed to spend most of their existence among the dead.

  His expedition might be deemed wrongheaded, but so had the travels of so many. Mr. Darwin among them. Vasco da Gama or Ferdinand Magellan. To be a husband and father, employed as a day clerk in a bank, these circumstances would not prevent him from launching his own quest for discovery.

  Empirically, inarguably—as Henry Stanley has so recently discovered the long-lost Dr. Livingstone—Felix would strike out to rescue God. In the coarse, in the profane, his expedition to find God would lead Felix into the darkest depth of the human heart.

  To that end, his journal had become an encyclopedia of missteps and mistakes. A cookbook compiled of the recipes for getting lost forever. A primer of all that might befall one, Felix’s would be a book to save people.

  Where the horrors of actual human suffering fell short, his own imagination provided the more-extreme elements, transforming the merely shocking into the truly appalling. No depth had he not plumbed. From no horror had he averted his eyes. And in truth, his book was ready. Tonight was merely a lark, a victory lap. In a few weeks’ time the creatures he regarded around him, these tipplers and dope fiends, the misbred, absent limbs or blessed with extras: with fins and webbed fingers, every literate person on the street could wonder over them and mutter their secret names: Sloe-Eyed Waltraud, Alligator Holger, Dent-Headed Bertina.

  Felix longed to hear the stories only told in whispers, in tears after midnight. He yearned to see the something behind the curtain of everything visible. To this end he sponsored strangers’ ale so he might siphon off their madness. And better was his side of the trade. For men cannot know each other’s hearts, not while they’re of sound mind. Standardized words are more handicap than help. Neither are gestures any use. It is only after the intellect collapses that any true communication exists.

  In this would be his revenge, for among these misfits, Piss-Pot Manfred and Leper Fritz Marie and Bruno the Albino Hermaphrodite, included among their company was his father, unrecognizable still. The man had abandoned the bosom of his family for this crass world and in retribution, Felix M—— would shine a destroying light on everything here. When he’d been no older than his son was at present, Felix had been compelled to become his own guide through life, and he’d been cast as the sounding board for his mother’s endless suffering and worries. This compendium would establish his fortune in the world, and with luck it would devastate his father’s.

  These were the thoughts agitating in his brain when a voice called across the littered tavern. Every sensate face, toothless mouths agape, eyes festering, glanced up in response, and the voice called, again. A male voice, so vibrant as to carry through the din, it said, “Who’ll front me a glass, anon?” Someone laughed in dismissal.

  “Prithee a drink,” the voice called, “forsooth a drink and in trade mayhap shall I personally shew thee a most loathsome monster.”

  Piqued was Felix’s interest. The slums, these wallows and sump holes of dissipation, might yet offer a fright he’d overlooked. Such would be a fine addition to his missive. He’d still no clear view of the caller, but Felix shouted back, “What monster?” While the crowd quieted out of curiosity—for even among the deformed and demented, there exists a curiosity for truer monsters—Felix placed a hand in his coat pocket and counted out the price of a draught.

  The voice, in its attic faux-cabulary, called out, “The monster tis a wee ’un, but methinks ’tis not like any child thine eyne agone beheld.” With this the speaker stepped forward, making himself known in the mass of swaying, salivating, sin-pitted sub-degenerates.

  Presenting himself was a rapscallion of the most exuberate sort. The man who stepped forward showed no ill effects of having availed the vice surrounding him. His limbs appeared sound. His age and physicality were not dissimilar to Felix’s own, and the latter guessed that here was a predator, one who took advantage of the weaker sorts and siphoned off their meager resources. More than a spark of orange mania gleamed in his eyes. To accompany this robust type into the empty night would be sheer folly. Any proposed excursion would doubtlessly end in Felix being robbed and drugged and his eventual corpse being sold to the instructor of anatomy at the local college of surgeons. Tomorrow would dawn with his viscera displayed upon a marble slab for the edification of a gallery filled with yawning first-year medical students.

  Yet, and yet Felix waved for the man to join him and signaled for the barkeep to serve them. As the stranger took occupancy of a chair within whispering distance, Felix noted that he was not ill-formed. Albeit disheveled, his costume suggested a dissolute gentleman. The man’s untidy, shoulder-length hair hinted at a desert prophet lifted from some verse of the Old Testament. Felix steeled himself for disappointment: He’d come to consider himself a connoisseur of the grotesque, and the stranger’s promise would most likely amount to hyperbole. At best, the bargain would reveal something along lines similar to Barnum’s Fiji Mermaid: the taxidermied torso of one unfortunate victim grafted onto the legs of another, with the talons of an emu drafted to serve as arms, and the ears of a fox sewn to the head of a long-expired chimpanzee.

  Nevertheless, Felix M—— knew that his genius relied not so much on what was shown him but on his skill at depicting it. No matter how makeshift and mundane the actual horror, he could bring it to greater life on the page. He would provision this wag with ale and take the short walk to witness his so-called monster, but whatever was revealed would never surpass the image already taking shape in Felix’s imagination. There, the cast-aside product of a mentally deficient whore and her physically deformed attacker, the child of violence was merely a bolus of flesh with features scarcely recognizable as human. In the notes Felix jotted, the monster was already dragging its boneless self across a filthy basement floor. The abandoned creature survived by any means possible. It survived like a stray cur that fed on the feces of other animals. It supped on spilt acts of onanism, so much like curdled milk or viscous egg whites. For sustenance, it gummed rags saturated in stale menses, and when the sewers overflowed, that was the occasion for Felix’s monster to feast.

  Oh, as the stranger led him from the tavern, Felix vowed silently that he would make much of this monstrous child. It would serve him as the centerpiece of his taxonomy, and he would mount a cause célèbre for its redemption. Subjected to his account, no feeling heart would be left unscathed. To perpetrate such a coup, the possibility beguiled him. The public sympathy would be greatly aroused. A rescue campaign, mounted at his insistence. But no monster would ever be located, at least none to rival the monster put forth by Felix’s mental faculties.

  Leading him along passageways and mews flooded with puddles of corruption, the stranger said, “Avaunt, good sire.” These low byways of the city were well known to Felix from his months of traipsing. He’d grown to be an authority on the tunnels and warrens which formed a city beneath the city.

  A heavy snow was falling. The swirls of white turned each of the district’s few streetlights into a tall bride draped in a long wedding veil. A sarcophagied quality characterized the dark. The trickaricious crumbling down of snowflakes. And as the pair trod along, a sepulchrious quiet jellied around them.

  Felix M—— gave a warm thought to his wife, asleep, her body poured out of milk.

  Advancing upon each gas lamp, their shadows fell behind them, and while taking leave of each their shadows fell before them. In this way, each measure of the journey marked a false day with the rising and setting of each flickering sun. Through this succession of seeming weeks did they continue to walk until arriving at the terminus of a blind alley. There a forbidding wall defaced with graffiti blocked their progress. Thick was the work of vandals: their painted opinions and signatures, opinions layered ove
r opinions, filling the wall and succeeding one another with such vigor that the very stuff of the wall was obliterated. Whether it consisted of brick or wood, of mortared stone or troweled plaster, Felix could offer no guess. So thick was the application of paint, and so hectic the effort to obliterate the competing brushwork, that no clue remained as to the wall’s purpose or belonging.

  So dense were the painted outcries that none were legible. Were these words of warning? In runny scrawls were all the words obliterated in ruddy hues of blood and tar.

  Even at this impasse, the stranger did not stop but reached forward toward the commingled curse words and profanities. His fingers found purchase around something invisible among the blasphemies whose paint censored earlier blasphemies. Felix watched the man’s wrist twist and heard the clack and drag of a bolt being drawn aside. A dark crack opened in what had been a solid wall of words. The crack widened, as the stranger drew open a door. Yes, Felix marveled, before them stood a door so layered over with competing spatters that no one might ever discover it.

  His body positioned so as to bar the entrance, the stranger spoke. “Prithee pay heed, the first-most rule regarding the monster is thee must nevermore speak of meeting the monster.”

  The stranger continued to speak thusly in the stilted, archaic parlance of his forebearers a century ere. “The second-most rule regarding the monster is thee must nevermore speak of meeting the monster.” Then, only when Felix had agreed to those terms did the stranger move aside with a welcoming sweep of his arm, and Felix stepped into the void beyond the mysterious door. No more than a stride within, a narrow set of stairs descended into still a more-lightless realm.