Nothing is inflammable, p.14
Nothing Is Inflammable, page 14
The Engineers?
“Let me in!” I screamed, I screamed, I screamed.
And a voice said “Dziga,” and everything went quiet again. I was aware of the great machines in the distance stopping all work, frozen.
I touched the metal of the door and it was scorched from the vicious air and angry hot currents from the nearby smelting plant.
“What . . . ?”
There was a heavy click and the door loosened in its frame. The pressure of the locks had gone and I pushed the door slightly with my forefinger and it moved, it moved, it was opening.
So there was the fear of the world and everything it might contain.
And there was the fear of the lab and everything I already knew it would contain; my cage, my rusted iron sarcophagus, my pneumatic womb.
I breathed once, twice.
Then opened the door.
Chapter Fifteen
Wherein Dziga confronts the Protohuman and they become one
There was no one there.
No lurking figures, no more footsteps.
No squeak of rubber soles against plastic flooring. Nothing.
The piles of paper and chemicals that I had stacked up inside the corridor remained as they were before I had been shut out of the lab. The debris remained but were now joined by the corpses, my puppets.
They lay slumped awkwardly across one another, the storage cupboard open and ransacked. Jakobsen looked like he had been turned inside out but perhaps he had been like that when I had stuffed him in there.
And before them, a message scrawled on the floor.
You will never get out.
The words were still wet and running, a dark glutinous red.
Never. Get. Out.
Everything was so quiet.
Through the still-open door behind me, the great rusted machines hissed and grated and rumbled in the distance once more, reminding me of their presence.
And at the end of the corridor, the fizzing blue glow that emanated more brightly than ever from the observation room, silhouetting the vague figure of the Protohuman just as it disappeared around the corner. I began towards him then stopped.
My breathing remained labored but seemed to have shallowed out and I looked down to see that I was standing in the bloody message.
I couldn’t swallow. Just take me. I felt like I had been lingering on a precipice for so long now that all I wanted was for the wind to sweep me forwards and off into whatever lay below if it meant not having to stare at my death any longer.
I froze where I was, listened.
I gazed down into the blackness below me, wondering what machine-parts, what jagged persecution, lay there. This was the feeling of standing by a roadside and calmly walking into the traffic, of climbing onto a bridge and then stepping off, of holding your head under the water and fighting against your body’s every instinct—of not taking your own life but of just letting it go.
“Dziga.”
The word, my name, crept through the poisoned air like an arachnid, crunched through the broken Pyrex. I went towards the static light emanating from the observation room and the Protohuman was waiting for me, not so much standing as hanging, as if he were being maintained by an unseen suspension. His hands were crossed before him, his bloodied, guilty hands.
How far he had come.
“Dziga,” he said, the first word he had ever spoken.
“What are you doing to me?” I pleaded softly. “What is this?”
He was the only one left, the only one that hadn’t betrayed me.
“Dziga.” Like a heartbeat, like a heartbeat.
He held up his hands for me then pointed and I looked at my own hands. They were as bloodied as his.
“Dziga.”
He motioned for me to sit in the chair and I did so. He loomed over me and took my wrist, slipped it into a leather cuff that was attached to the chair, that was a part of the chair. He tightened it, repeated the procedure on the other wrist, then on my ankles.
Images of the lab flickered across the screens before me, and of the factories and drilling machines outside and of the hospital wards, all merging with one another. And then a shot of us in the present and on the screen I watched my creature secure me to the chair solemnly just as the doctors would have when I was due for a treatment.
Electricity filled the air like a swarm of insects.
“Are we safe?” I asked the Protohuman as he finished his work and stood beside me. The restraints were tight enough that I could only sense him there but I watched him on one of the monitors. “They’re not coming, are they?”
“There’s nobody here, Dziga,” the creature said. “Just you.”
“So we’re safe.”
The Protohuman didn’t answer. Instead he said, “Watch.”
So I did.
Dziga is hunched over his desk, scribbling madly on several pieces of paper spread out before him. In the corner of the shot, Judas circles in his cage, turning, turning, turning. Dziga looks up and says something and the monkey is still. Dziga stands and turns.
Cut.
Dziga washes himself over the sink, staring into a grubby mirror. Scrubs his face, his neck.
Watches his reflection.
Cut.
Jakobsen sits beside Dziga on a ratty, torn sofa chair, holding a steaming mug in one hand. The two talk, then Jakobsen hands the scientist something, rolled up newspapers. In return Dziga gives him a single scrap of paper. A further verbal exchange takes place and they both stand. The camera cuts with them, following them along the corridor and into the main lab.
From the same camera view as before, Judas’ cage is sheathed in a black cloth.
The screen flickers, sparked by static.
They both stand before the Protohuman, blocking the camera’s view of the creature.
Cut.
From another angle, above their heads, the two men stare at the wall.
At something propped up against the wall.
Cut.
Close-up of Dziga’s faced crumpling as he sinks a needle into his arm.
Cut.
Dziga feeding a line of powder into each nostril.
Cut.
Dziga placing two tablets on his tongue, rolling them back.
Cut.
Dziga passed out on the floor, surrounded by broken glass and scalpel blades. Staring up in the camera with a vague smile on his blurry face.
Cut.
Dziga moving through the lab from one desk to another, from one room to another, the film speed double what it should be so that his movements are jerky, comical. He takes a syringe and opens the chest freezer, pulls out all the food, and injects.
Cut.
Dziga spreads out newspapers across his workbenches, pulling pages from them at random, throwing them to the floor, inadvertently blocking the cameras view.
Cut.
Now beside him as he works feverishly with the newsprint.
Stops.
Cut.
101.6.
Cut.
Dziga is moving again, pacing up and down the main lab and his image is somehow reflected behind him. There is a mirror chained to the wall behind him.
Cut.
He is in the corridor, raking through a cupboard, pulling pieces of equipment from the shelves and dropping them to the ground. He takes something out and it drags a cord behind it.
Cut.
He places it on the counter and pressed the cord into an electrical socket next to the microwave.
Cut.
Close-up from behind the counter and the cord is frayed, wires peeling out of their protective coating and Dziga tried to shove these into the plug socket. They drop out limply but Dziga hits the power switch anyway. He adjusts the frequency dial, jumps as if he has been given a shock.
Cut.
Dziga carries something from the main lab into his operating room. It is tall, rectangular, thin.
Light glints within it when it is at certain angles.
He lays it on the operating table and straps it down.
Cut.
The door opens and what lies beyond it is a strange creature cocooned in a bubble-machine. Dziga steps to one side and the creatures rolls into the lab.
Cut.
They are in the main lab, beside Judas’ cage. Dziga pokes through the bars and the monkey retreats.
Cut.
And Dziga stands over his operating table, pulls himself up onto it. He swivels, lies down on it. He reaches to each side and puts on leg restraints, then one on his left wrist. With his one free hand he reaches back and takes a metal cap from one of the trays and places it on his head. He grips the table and jerks suddenly.
The camera stares down at him as tears spill from his eyes.
Cut.
Dziga works, Dziga works. A convoluted system of clear glass pipes and test tubes are arranged on the workbench and he moves amongst them. He scribbles notes.
Cut.
He tears through a newspaper.
Cut.
He feeds Judas.
Cut.
He looks up from his work.
Cut.
He enters the corridor, stares at the door, then suddenly turns and runs into one of the storage closets. He presses himself deep inside and closes the door. Inside, he bangs from wall to wall, knocking things from the shelves, crushing them
Cut.
And he bursts from the cupboard, stumbles, flailing at nothing, nothing at all. He collides with the opposite wall and falls to the ground, hiding his face with his hands in sheer terror.
Cut.
Dziga stares into the mirror, grinning.
He is partway through the procedure, half of his face at first what appears to be in shadow but then more clearly visible as being sheathed in blood. He hold a scalpel in one hand, uses the other to tighten his skin before he pushes the blade in and begins to cut more pieces away. He takes a loose flap between thumb and forefinger and pulls. It peels off like rotting wallpaper and he drops it into the sink beneath him, the constant stream of running water chasing these fragments away.
Cut.
Everything froze.
“Do you see?” a voice said, somewhere behind me. This is now, this is live, this is no recording.
“I see,” I replied softly.
Then the tapes started playing again.
Cut to a wide-angle view of the lab and Jakobsen standing before Dziga, clutching his briefcase. He is gesticulating wildly and Dziga, face a carpet of frayed red edges, grin back. Suddenly Dziga slaps the briefcase from the man’s hands and jumps at him. There is a struggle, the shots cutting quickly, too quickly, and nothing is quiet clear.
Dziga grabs Jakobsen’s head and shoves it into the ground until it is a head no longer.
Cut.
Dziga swings, swings a hammer, and the shot pans out to show him attacking the unmoving corpse of his brother, draped in the ruins of his broken bubble. Dziga hits him again and again and again.
Cut.
Dziga is still punching and this time it is the wall he is attacking, chipping at it with a fragment of steel, breaking the plaster away in chunks. He leans in.
Cut.
Dziga stares into the camera, eyes widening.
Cut.
Dziga runs through the lab, hands covering his ears, screaming.
Cut.
Dziga is staring into the object he earlier had laid out on the operating table. He is talking to it, his words numb.
Cut.
He is breaking more pieces of the wall away again, punching through to a storage room, ignoring the door that was slightly to the left and creating his own entrance. He steps inside and the room is empty.
Cut.
He sits on the floor of the empty room, staring at the rear wall.
Cut to close-up.
His eyes move as if he is following something. His bloodied face glows in an non-existent light.
Dziga watches himself.
Cut.
“Do you understand?” a voice said.
My voice said.
I said.
I turned to look at the Protohuman, no longer there. I turned back and the monitors were all gone, everything gone, and I was sitting on the cold, hard floor staring at a blank wall.
“I understand,” I told myself.
I understand I am alone. I understand there is no one here.
I got up and walked back down the corridor, past the bodies and into the main lab.
Chained to the wall was a large mirror, five and half feet by two and a half feet, framed with chunky metal, cracked in places around the edges but clear and clean. I knelt before it and the Protohuman stared back at me.
And as everything became clearer, as it does when you are faced by your own demise, I smiled a little.
The Protohuman smiled a little.
And I realized I had built a god.
There was only a small part of me left now, the only thing that linked us to the human race, the final strand of DNA to be unraveled. After this what? Would there be a place for the Protohuman out there, amidst the dunes of static and wrecking yards? In that instant I pictured us wandering majestically through the wastescape, a Chromosomic Prince that continued what I had begun, discarding the irrelevancies, inconsistencies and irrationalities of Homo Sapiens.
The creature moved as I moved, my reflection.
It was my duty as the progenitor of the Protohuman to step aside when we had reached a point where I myself was too full of irrationalities to be of use to our development. How many painters can leave their portraits to complete the rendering themselves? How proud would a sculptor be as he observed his finest work cleave itself from the raw block it started as, shaping and toning itself by the very hand the sculptor gave it?
And yet I could not deny my own instincts. That final human part of me was not ready to be discarded.
I stared back at it from within the glass, mocking the arrogance that allowed it to think that it had not outgrown me and that it was through a mistake of my own making that I had made this error in the Protohuman’s maturation.
“Let me go,” Dziga said to me as firmly as he could manage. “I want to take you away from here. It doesn’t matter if you’re responsible for all this, none of that matters. I forgive you.”
But the pact he was trying to make was a desperate one, the pact of a convict trying to buy his way out of his execution when he had nothing of value for his executioner.
“I don’t want to have to harm you, but I will if you leave me no other choice.”
I could see myself so clearly and my expression was as unreadable as I had intended—anger or deceit or happiness, which? I was so proud.
“Dziga,” the human said again. “Would you kill me?”
But I was no longer a part of that name, of that creature.
I raised my hand and showed him the scalpel.
There was fear on Dziga’s face. There would never be fear on my face again. Never.
Automatonophobia—Fear of anything that falsely represents a sentient being.
“Don’t . . . ” he said weakly.
But he knew what would happen.
And he looked down again at my bloodied hands and the blade.
I told him, “You will never get out.”
And I shoved the knife into his face, cutting and thrusting , punching him with it, hard, harder, again and again and there was the sound of glass shattering and more and I grew wet with blood and it was beautiful.
When I finished I looked down and there were a thousand fragments of me staring back instead of just one.
An army.
I stood, walked into the corridor and then wrote on the floor with my bloodied hands.
Never get out.
The Protohuman is that which sustains me, the concept, the hallucination. The dream and nightmare. I watch myself stoop over the mirror, telling it I am going to draw blood, then sink the needle into my own arm. I take notes. I draw up further procedures. I try to escape myself. I try to escape everything that I am.
Over. And over. And over.
But I can’t escape myself.
I can’t escape.
I will never get out.
Never. Get. Out.
It all goes around. Everything is cycles, a production line. I build myself then that new construction builds another. There is no purpose to it. Its creation. There is no reason.
And I will never get out.
DEVASTATION
The thing was immense and skeletal, rising out of the spray of the rain, one hundred feet and more, jagged and painfully incomplete. She stared up at a length of girders towards the very top of it through the grimy window of the bus as they left the construction site. It looked like a finger, pointing.
She sat towards the back of the bus, away from the other workers, although nobody really spoke anyway. The rain made it sound as if they were driving through a war zone, water machine gunning against the rusted metal of the vehicle. She played with the dressing that was wrapped around her wrist, prodding the soft flesh beneath just to feel it sting.
The bus arrived at the drop-off point and the workers began to unload, gathering their bags and belongings from the storage area underneath the seating. She took her own backpack and left without exchanging a word with anyone.
It was a simple three block walk to the squat but she procrastinated, meandering through alleys and across the loading bay of a storage warehouse, down through an underground tunnel that passed beneath the main road. Around. Around. She was already soaked through but the rain didn’t bother her.
Eventually she ran out of diversions to take and approached the old house she had been squatting in for . . . for how long? She couldn’t remember. It was three stories high, around twenty rooms but most of them were completely unlivable. She produced a key and unlocked the padlock holding together the chain link perimeter fencing around the back then climbed in the kitchen window. The doors had all been nailed shut.
