The Letter Killers Club Read online

  “A nonsense syllable,” muttered Fev from his corner.

  The young man leafing through the Gospel thought so too at first. But the dash separating the S from the um intrigued him. Running an eye down the Vulgate’s* margins, he noticed another mark in ink bracketing two verses: “Behold my servant, whom I have chosen …”* and so on, and “He shall not strive, nor cry;* neither shall any man hear his voice in the streets.” A vague presentiment compelled him to scan the margins with more care, page by page; three chapters later he found the faint score of a fingernail: “ … O Lord, thou son of David;* my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil. But he answered her not a word.” The margins that followed appeared to be blank. But the composer of Commentary on Silence was too intrigued to abandon his search: examining the pages in the light, he discovered several more marks grown faint, the work of someone’s sharp fingernail—and opposite these: “And when he was accused of the chief priests* and elders, he answered nothing. Then said Pilate unto him, Hearest thou not how many things they witness against thee? And he answered him to never a word; insomuch that the governor marveled greatly.” Or: “But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote* on the ground, as though he heard them not”; some marks could be seen only with a magnifying glass, others stood out; some were shorter than a dash and picked out only three or four words—for instance, “And he withdrew himself into the wilderness …”* or “But Jesus held his peace”;* others extended down a series of verses, setting off whole episodes and stories—and every time it was a story about questions never answered, about a silent Jesus. That of which the old St. Gall neumes spoke as though stammering, but spoke all the same, was marked and scored—with a fingernail skipping words to the end. Now it was clear: on the yellowed pages of that tattered tome, beside the four who had spoken, a fifth Gospel with no need of words was giving forth from the book’s blank margins: The Gospel According to Silence. Now the S-um, too, made sense: it was simply a flattened Silentium. Can one speak about silence without destroying it? Can one comment on what … Well, in a word, book killed book—with a single blow—and I won’t describe how my person-theme’s manuscript burned. Let’s just say it burned like …

  Tyd turned toward Rar. But Rar refused his gaze: shading his eyes with his palm, he sat motionless, seeming not to listen or hear.

  “As for the title,” Tyd rose, “I think the best word here would be—”

  “Autobiography,” snapped Rar, returning the blow. Tyd’s head jerked up like a rooster’s, he opened his mouth to speak but his voice was drowned in a cacophony of sniggers, wheezes, screams, and yelps. Only three were not laughing: Rar, Tyd, and I.

  The conceivers took their departure one by one. Among the first to leave was Rar. I wanted to go after him, but a familiar pressure on my elbow stopped me. “A few questions,” and, taking me aside, the master of Saturdays asked at length about my impressions. My responses were curt and off the cuff as I was in a hurry to get away and catch Rar. Finally, fingers and questions relaxed their grasp—and I rushed out. Beneath the blazing canopy of arc lamps I saw a retreating back some hundred paces ahead. Drawing even with it, I failed in my haste to notice the walking stick jabbing the pavement.

  “Forgive me for bothering you …”

  The man I had mistaken for Rar turned and stared at me in silence with round, glinting lenses.

  Disconcerted, I mumbled God knows what and dashed off. The question that had tormented me that entire week would have to wait until the next Saturday.

  [1]To each his own, my friends.(Lat.)

  [2]In the midst of life we are in death. (Lat.)

  4

  THE NEXT Saturday the revealing of conceptions fell to Das. I entered the room of blank bookshelves as the story was about to begin. Trying to hide from the round spectacles that leapt up to greet me, I drew my chair closer to the fire flicking at the black shadows of men frozen in motionlessness—and instantly became as silent and still as they.

  Das butted the air with his bristly red head, then propped his chin on the handle of his walking stick. Rapping out occasional dots and dashes, he began his story.

  Exes: that is what they called—or, rather, will some day call—the machines about which I shall now attempt to tell you. Scientists had longer, more sophisticated names for them: differential ideomotors, ethical engine adjusters, exteriorizators, and I can’t remember what else; but most people, flattening and shortening those names, called them simply: exes. However, I should begin at the beginning.

  We no longer know exactly when the idea of exes first sprang into man’s head. As early as the middle of the twentieth century, I believe, or even earlier. One sunny, windy morning at a crossroads in a large, rather noisy, and chaotic city, several vociferous women stood in front of a shop window hawking brassieres. The wind kept snatching their wares out of their hands, tugging at the straps and causing the lacy batiste to balloon. Jostling people pushed past without paying any attention to the work of the wind or the hawkers’ cries. Only one man, in the midst of crossing the rackety street, suddenly slowed his step and stared at the fluttering forms. Noticing his gaze, the hawkers shouted and beckoned to him from the sidewalk: mine—not hers—mine—don’t buy theirs—mine are cheaper! An automobile bearing down on the bemused man slammed to a halt—an irate chauffeur shouted through the glass, threatening to flatten him into a pancake. But the man, tearing his eyes away from the batiste and his soles away from the pavement, continued on his way without turning into either a pancake or a customer. And if the hectic youth who mistook our passer for someone else—racing up, then away—had been able to see through eyes to what is behind them, he would have understood once and for all: everyone always mistakes everyone for someone else.

  But neither the youth, nor the chauffeur, nor the hawkers, whose eyes had been caught by the passing eccentric, saw or suspected that at that very second into that very head had sprung the idea of exes. The associations in the head of the mysterious passer, who left nothing to posterity but odd pages from untitled drafts, went like this: “Wind—separation and inflation of outer forms—ether wind—separation, exteriorization, inflation of inner forms of thought—vibrations, vibrograms inside cranium; blast of ether wind drives entire ‘I’ out, into world—and to hell with the straps.” This flight of associations then landed in a vise; logic set to work and experience accrued over decades bestirred itself: “We must socialize psyches; if a blast of air can blow the hat off my head and drive it before me, then why not blow the entire psychic contents hiding inside people’s heads out from under their craniums with a controlled stream of ether; why not turn every in, damn it, into an ex?”

  The man beset by the idea of exes was an idealist, a dreamer; his somewhat patchy erudition could not activate ideas, could not harness dreams. Legend has it that this Anonym, who left people his brilliant outlines, died in poverty and obscurity and that his formulas and drawings, largely naïve and practically useless, passed from hand to hand until finally falling into the hands of engineer Tutus. For Tutus, thinking was synonymous with model-building, things propelled his thoughts as the wind does a sail; while still in his youth he became interested in the old ideomotor principle* and immediately built a model ideomotor, a machine that replaces the physiological contraction of a muscle with a mechanical one. Even before encountering Anonym’s drafts, Tutus had refined ancient experiments with tetanus in frogs by means of his own bold and exact tests. For example, by connecting the weak web of muscles cradling the frog’s eye to his ideomotor, Tutus could make the eye move this way or that; or he could arrest the eye while fixed on an object, causing it to fill with tears, and the eyelid to open and close. But these rather crude experiments in creating what Tutus called an “artificial observer” proved little, since the physiological innervation* from the frog’s nerve centers continued to function, interfering with the artificial innervation from the machine. Anonym’s ideas had the immediate effect of broadening Tutus’s outlook and the scope o
f his experiments: he realized that the machine must take control of those human movements and muscular contractions that had a clear social significance. Anonym maintained that reality, whose component parts are actions, had “too many parts and too small a sum.” Only by taking innervation away from separately functioning nervous systems and giving it to a single, central innervator, said Anonym, could one organize reality according to plan and put paid to that amateurish “I.” By replacing the jolts from individual wills with the jolts from one “ethical machine” built according to the latest advances in morals and technology, one could make everyone give everything back: a complete ex.

  Even earlier, while perfecting his ideomotor and unaware of its future use, Tutus had included in its basic functions the main muscles connected with the brain’s efferent system.* But then a somewhat distasteful case had suspended and hobbled his work for a long time. The case was this: Tutus had come to know a prominent public figure, a man of great will and imperiousness, but suffering from a strange disease: what had begun as a simple hemiplegia* had spread throughout his body, atrophying almost the entire voluntary muscular system. The disease was gradually demuscling this man; the most elementary hand movement, every step, the articulation of words cost him more and more effort; as his will hardened and, focused on the fight for influence, steadily intensified, the range of his actions diminished: his muscles grew increasingly slack and flabby until finally his spirit was stuck fast inside a sack of skin and fat hanging limp and all but inert. The poor man turned for help to Tutus, who set about reawakening his activity. Every day the innervator’s keys, by contracting and relaxing the sick man’s muscles, would force his body to lumber from wall to door and back, his arms to swing and his mouth to articulate the words it tapped out. But the actions thus imparted were extremely limited: trailing coils of cords, the politician’s body lurched lifelessly, as if on a lunge, after the clatter of mechanical keys. True, the patient could still scrawl unaided—slowly and laboriously—the plan for each session. After three weeks of attempts to break through to life, the tightly tied sack of skin and fat, pushing the pencil lead inserted between its limp fingers, managed to scrawl: kill myself. Tutus pondered the plan and decided to turn it into a sort of experimentum crucis:* even in his experiments with this seemingly completely demuscled subject, the work of the mechanical innervator had been spoilt by unaccountable scrawls of will that got mixed up in the machine’s precise musical score. It was impossible to anticipate every form of volitional resistance; what’s more, an experiment with suicide was bound to involve a moment of violent conflict between the will of the machine and that of the man. Tutus proceeded as follows: having quietly emptied a bullet case of its gunpowder, he slipped the cartridge—in full view of his subject—into the cylinder of a revolver, cocked the trigger, and enfolded the weapon of death in the inert fingers. Now the machine went to work: the fingers twitched, then gripped the gun handle; the forefinger produced an incorrect reflex—Tutus adjusted the refractory finger inside the trigger’s curve. Another press of the key—the man’s arm sprang up, bent at the elbow, and brought the barrel to his temple. Tutus scrutinized the subject: his facial muscles showed no signs of resistance; true, his eyelashes fluttered and the points of his pupils had become large black blots. “Very good,” Tutus muttered, turning around to press the next key—but how strange, the key was stuck. Tutus pressed harder: he heard a metallic click. First he inspected his machine, depressing and releasing the key that had now come unstuck. Then he flipped some switches, and suddenly the human sack with the incomprehensible self-will pitched forward, flapped its arms like a bird shot in flight, and slumped to the floor. Tutus dashed up: the subject was dead.

  Anonym’s rough drafts, having returned our experimenter—as I said—to his experiments, forced Tutus to abandon the old-fashioned system of wires, terminals, and clamps to which his modeling mind had clung for so long so as to maintain a direct connection between the transmitter and receiver of an action. Leafing through the faded pages, Tutus felt the first puff of the “ether wind” imagined by Anonym. I don’t know enough about power engineering to understand the construction of his new wireless ideomotors. Tutus himself was soon all tangled up in his own field of expertise: the problem was that physiological innervation resisted impulses relayed through the ether even more fiercely than those straight from a machine. Close to despair after many repeat experiments, Tutus finally realized that only by isolating a subject’s musculature from the nervous system, only by separating one from the other, could the ideomotor take full control of the subject’s actions and behavior.

  It was at this point that he became aware of the experiments of two Italian bacteriologists, by name Nototti. Nototti the Elder, well before the work of Tutus, had discovered “brain parasites.” Even before that, science had half established the existence of myelophags—formed elements which, by absorbing the pulp of peripheral nerves,* caused neuritis.* But we can assume that Nototti, taking full advantage of microscopy and chemotaxis,* was the first to come across this highly complex and elusive fauna of the brain. By imitating patient gardeners, as he liked to say, Nototti obtained various species and subspecies of brain bacteria, which he collected in the form of ordinary gelatinous cultures inside sealed flasks. He could not do in his glass bacteria-breeders what Mendel* had done with pollen: for one thing, the bacteria were infinitely smaller than grains of pollen; for another, the asexuality of microorganisms ruled out hybridization. But he did have this advantage: bacteria that settled on, say, nodes of Ranvier,* the thinnest parts of a neurofibril,* produced in twenty-four hours roughly as many generations as had humanity since the time of Christ. Thus in possession of a more compact time, as Nototti put it, he could, by gradually changing the thermal and chemical effects, achieve results in the world of bacteria that in experiments with domesticated animals would require millennia. In short, Nototti managed to create a special species of microorganisms that parasitized the brain; he called them vibrophags. Injected under the meninges,* vibrophags proliferated and attacked, as caterpillars do the branches of fruit trees, the branchings of outflowing nerves, clustering mainly where nerves emerged from under the cerebral cortex. Vibrophags were neither parasites nor saprophytes,* in the exact sense of the word: stealing inside a neurilemma,* these infinitesimal predators devoured not matter but energy, they fed on vibrations, on the energy-producing discharge of nerve cells; clogging all the exits for nervous energy, blocking up all the brain’s windows on the world, these bacteria intercepted the brain’s signals and discharges, using them to fuel their own miniscule bodies. This discovery allowed Nototti the Elder to embark, at long last, on the experiment for which he had been preparing all his life. This man with the neck of a bull and the voice of a eunuch had always hoped to find a scientific basis for the philosophical legend, long buried and forgotten, concerning “innate ideas.”* “Send an army of my vibrophags into the newborn brain in advance of its first sensations,” thought Nototti, “and they, without harming the brain’s material substance and its offshoots, will bar the way, they will intercept the world flowing in along nerve wires to the brain; provided we have immunized (as far as possible) the motor nerves, especially the articulation apparatus, the soul will then confide its ideae innatae.”

  This cruel eccentric (most eccentrics are cruel), while discovering invisibilities, was blind to the obvious. A believer in tattered Cartesian ghosts,* Nototti began conducting his risky experiments on infants at the inoculation center affiliated with his laboratory. The result was an absurd court trial—“horrific,” the papers called it. The old scientist was convicted in the deaths of dozens of children; having begun in a laboratory, he finished in prison. His works, discredited and washed away by the blood of his victims, were forsaken and forgotten.

  Then Nototti the Younger, anxious to restore the family’s good name, began conducting experiments a contrario: whereas the father had tried to seal the brain’s entrances, the son now sought to plug all
the exits with corks of live bacteria. Nototti the Younger, oppressed by the act that had disgraced his father, seemed to want to do away with all acts for all time. Perhaps no man was more averse to the ideas of Anonym, who had preached the enrichment of actuality with actions, and yet he was just the man to put Anonym’s thoughts into practice.

  Young Nototti soon obtained a new variety of vibrophag: this variety parasitized only the motor nerves, insinuating itself between will and muscle. But this stubborn man was not satisfied: in studying the chemical processes inside motor nerve fibers, Nototti ascertained the barely perceptible difference between the chemotaxes of separate nerve trunks: he discovered an astonishing fact: the fibers regulating a person’s voluntary movements produced chemical reactions somewhat unlike those of sympathetic-system fibers* and innervators not involved in volitional effort. Old man Nototti, who loved old philosophical blueprints, would likely have set about trying to prove the long-discarded doctrine of free will,* but his son, who disliked metaphysical reminiscences, forged ahead, without a backward glance at any blueprints; again using chemotaxis, he lured his vibrophags to the voluntary-innervation system, and when he had determined the characteristics of this new subspecies, he christened this peculiar microculture actiophags, or, as he later described them, “facteaters.” Now, without risk of rotting in prison, he might inject “facteaters” into nervous-system fibrils. Still, his father’s fate and possibly his own experience with the problem of liquidating acts had made Nototti the Younger extremely cautious: taking the usual route that leads from rabbits and guinea pigs to Homo sapiens, he hesitated before sapiens.