Read The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman for Free Online

another night, BE MYSTERIOUS! Some nights later, she scribbled: DON’T THINK, LOOK; and, shortly after that, she warned me: WHEN YOU BEGIN TO THINK, YOU LOSE THE POINT. These messages irritated yet haunted me. They itched away all day inside my head like a speck of dust trapped beneath my eyelids. She was qualitatively different from the comic apparition purporting to be my mother who perched on the mantel-piece in the guise of a fat, white owl begging my forgiveness and hooting her orisons. This visible skeleton, this miraculous bouquet of bone, the formal elements of physicality, was one of the third order of forms who might presently invade us, the order of angels, speaking lions and winged horses, the miraculous revenants for whom the city sometimes seemed hushed in expectation and who themselves would only be the amazing heralds of the arrival of the Emperor of the Marvellous, whose creatures we would by that time have all become.
    We knew the name of our adversary. We knew the date at which he graduated in physics with honours from the national university. We knew his father had been a gentleman banker who dabbled a little in the occult and his mother a lady who liked to organize soup kitchens in the slums and sewing schools for repentant prostitutes. We even discovered, to the Minister’s tactful embarrassment, that my own mother, during one of her atoning fits, had stitched for me at one of Mrs Hoffman’s schools a pathetically disintegrating flannel under-garment which I wore for a day before the seams unravelled altogether, an appropriate symbol for my mother’s repentance. I suppose this coincidence gave me a certain tenuous sense of involvement with the Hoffman family – as if, one rainy afternoon, I had talked with an aunt of his briefly about the weather, on a stopping, country train. We knew the very date, 18 September 1867, on which Dr Hoffman’s great-grandfather arrived in this country, a minor aristocrat of slender means fleeing from unmentionable troubles in a certain wolf-haunted mountainous Slavonic principality which was subsequently rendered into legislative non-being during the Franco–Prussian war or some such war. We knew that, when his son was born, the father cast his horoscope and then gave the midwife who had delivered him a tip of several thousand dollars. We knew the boy Hoffman had been involved in a homosexual scandal at his preparatory school and we even knew how much it had cost to hush the scandal up. The Minister devoted an entire bank of computers to data on Dr Hoffman. We even tabulated his childhood illnesses and the Minister found especially significant an attack of brain fever in his seventh year and a
crise de nerfs
in his sixteenth.
    However, one day some twenty years previously, Dr Hoffman, the already enormously distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of P., dismissed with a few kind words and a handsome present the valet who looked after him; made a bonfire of his notebooks; packed in a valise a toothbrush, a change of shirts and underwear and the choicest of his father’s library of cabbalistic books; took a taxi to the central railway station; bought a single ticket to the mountain resort of L.; went to the correct platform, where he purchased a pack of imported cigarettes and a net of tangerines from the kiosk; was observed by a porter to peel and consume a fruit; was seen by another porter to enter the gentlemen’s lavatory; and then vanished. He vanished so expeditiously there were even obituaries in the press.
    In the years preceding the Reality War, an itinerant showman who gave his name as Mendoza made a small living touring country fairs and carnivals with a small theatre. This theatre did not have any actors; it was a peep-show cum cinematograph but it offered moving views in three dimensions and those who visited it were impressed by the lifelikeness of what they saw. Mendoza prospered. In time he came to the Whitsun Fair in the capital with his