I have to buy you (The clockwork boxes 6)

Andrew Tyler

 People were sitting or standing in crazy poses, shouting at the top of their lungs, all of them screaming the same words:

“Going once, , , , Going twice , , , , Going three times!”

“Sold, sold!”

“It belongs to this gentleman now!”

“Look at this amazing piece!”

In the middle of an enormous and circular, like a bubble, room, there was a crowd of people who were raising  theirs hands like crazy, some of them opening their palms, some others sticking their fingers out meaningfully, like little students in a classroom, yelling one at other’s ears. All this racket was taking place probably for the purchase of a terribly desirable object, which I couldn’t see well from where I was standing.

«Auction is in progress as you see. Step forward please, don’t hesitate and first of all don’t think about it! Today’s bargains are something else! Please do proceed and you will remember my words!»

The man who had guided me in that room, was looking straight into my eyes wishing to guess how much impressed I was by his words. Everything on him was impeccable. His eyebrows were perfectly aligned, like buckram decorative borders.

I wanted to ask where I was, who he was, why he was wearing these strange clothes underground, what on earth was going on into that room but I didn’t have the time. He pushed me forwards so strongly that I almost fell down. My nose landed on the back of an old gentleman who was yelling like crazy, the amount of money he wanted to bid. I was now among the rest of the crowd being pushed all over and pushing in the same frenzy.

“Be careful!” I heard the man shouting to me. “If you don’t bid quickly then you will be the one to be bid. You need speedy reflexes! Speedy, I say!”

The echo of his laughter made me feel  a rather weird delight. A queer high rectangular machine was standing in the middle of the room. There was a very big leather ribbon in its centre, uniting like a flexible axis  two side iron boxes, the one of which was sinking  half in the wall without its ending or its start being visible. On top of it there was a big label with the huge sign “OWN your PET” flashing in blinding color combinations. On the wide ribbon there were people, one stuck to the other, people who were posing in crazy positions. Most of them were blinking their eyes shyly, while others were sullen as if someone had woken them up from their deepest sleep. Some were sticking their tongues out and pulling their ears, grimacing like animals, whereas others were picking their noses being focused on it and there were some who lustfully were baring their chests or stroking their muscles so voluptuously that I thought they were ready to masturbate there, in front of us, masturbate at the thought of their own body.

I was speechless. I had never seen such a spectacle. And when I see something that shakes me, I am used to standing impotent to any kind of reaction. I am lying..just a little..The truth is that when I find myself in the middle of confusing situations, I just don’t want to react. I stand still and revel secretly in what I see or hear, moved deeply inside me by the fact that I can still be so intensely surprised. My body pulses hammer my brain. My heart beats so strongly and so rhythmically that I feel every beat like the softest touch of harmony that has ever shaken my life thread. My fingertips get dizzy by the sweetest numb, so sweet that it becomes unbearably erotic, same with the leaking knots of the watered sugar dripping on the tip of an impatient tongue.

My throat veins throb excited, flooding all my chest with a warm feeling and my stomach gurgles happily, squirming and twirling with delight  like a cat that purrs  as her lady’s hand runs softly along its spine. My bones tremble and resorb like a jelly-fish. I don’t know what shook me so strongly with happiness when I saw all this. The fact that some people were making fool of themselves, the secret existence of that leather ribbon underground, below the city pavements or the fact that I was also craving to make a fool of myself, jumping without anyone noticing me on the ribbon and offering  my brightest smile, my most perfect face and my most arrogant teeth line to everyone around? Or the fact that I had, all of a sudden, forgotten the exact meaning of the word ‘’ridicule” ?

Image: Andrew Tyler

I am the voice (The clockwork boxes 5)

At last I could see where my legs were walking! A relief sigh gave my frightened body the air it needed desperately. The platform was so narrow and it was slanting so much at some points that I had crossed it without falling by pure luck. I was in a dilemma! Should I go back as fast as I could or the lights would be switched off in the middle of my way to the exit, plunging me in anguish? My dilemmas of course were of rhetorical nature. Since I was a kid I  had developed a special technique on imagining myself involved in problematic situations, or standing indecisive before forked paths. Maybe that’s why my right palm had two forked spots embossed on it, deeply carved. The first was on my double head line and the other one at the end of  the fate line. An old palmist had predicted my certain craziness and my certain brilliant fame as a writer, both when I would be very old and unable to walk.

Could I do something else? Should I stay there? Should I continue my descending and walking? How much I dislike myself when I become so silly, incapable of just taking a damn decision! And this dense dark made me feel even more stupid and weaker. I didn’t have the luxury of having such thoughts at that moment. The sudden deafening creaking of an iron door split the silence around in a scary way . I was afraid that the light would switch off and I stuck my body onto the wall when a hand suddenly grabbed mine. I jumped backwards panicked, ready to shout and run, when a heavy  male voice, freed me from such a possibility.

“Come on sir! Hurry up please.You may come in.. If you wish of course..”

It was impossible! I was dreaming! Maybe that narrow dark corridor had some fumes which might have caused me hallucinations. The stranger’s frozen hand on mine, that voice of his, those words, someone I couldn’t see..

“Proceed please! You will cause a congestion. There are more people coming!”

The demanding tone of his voice didn’t give me a great choice. Hesitantly like a child that had accepted his father’s scolding, I stepped forward. I was invited somewhere, without knowing either who had invited me, or where I had been invited. Had I been hypnotised and been dragged down there or had I been self-hypnotised  by following that peculiar voice that every now and then talks into me?

“Wake up!” I demanded from myself irritated. “It is not time for thinking such things now!”

I decided to turn to the direction of the heavy male voice, following its sound. At the end of this sound, exactly at the point where its staccato echo tail was diminishing, I found a big guy who seemed to have been waiting for me, in fact waiting impatiently, looking all the time at the watch on his wrist and holding with his other hand a sizeable fan with latin numbers carved on it. He was dressed in a very expensive black tuxedo and a white shirt. A black, perfectly ironed papillon was tightening his throat with grace, making his veins bunching like a lilly bouquet over the top button of the shirt.

“I am the voice ” he said in a mysterious tone and pulled my arm softly, pushing a grey door behind him at the same time.

What I saw when the door closed was something that any reasonable man would never expect to see on an underground train platform. 

I closed my eyes tightly, my eyelids hurt so much that crimson clouds started marching in front of me. All this must have been part of a funny dream. I usually see such dreams, dreams that wake me up in the middle of the night laughing loudly. Oh, sure it was something like this! A lot of times I bury myself under my blanket so that neighbours can’t hear my loud laughter in the early hours.

But all was still there when I reopened my eyes. Nothing had moved from its previous position. Everything was at their initial point, exactly where my surprised eyes had left them hovering, having the sense of a shaking jelly dream. 

image: Toulouse Lautrec

The sound of darkness (The clockwork boxes 4)

Behind it I discerned the dark reflection of a railtrack line. I could hear from a distance the sound of the air caused by trains running on the rails one too close to the other. On the right, there was a small iron staircase which ended on a smaller platform. I went down carefully. Everything was creaking. Even the platform was moving gently, very very softly, like a floated raft, drifted by the sleeping water. I clenched tightly the staircase railing that was on the wall side  and I took a deep breath. The door closed behind me, either pushed by air or by a hand and I found myself in the total dark for a while with the clear sounds of the trains multiplied moaning  as they were touching the tracks. There was a train somewhere far but I sounded as if it was there, with me. And along with the metal clangs I could hear a strange whisper coming from many murmurs together. It was a thousand whispers as if thousands of people had been united in the dark under the earth surface, trying to race along the tracks, trying to be faster than the hissing distant echos of the trains.

I groped the wall and felt my blood leaving my body. I was scared to death. But why on earth had I gone there? This black darkness made me completely unable to direct myself properly, so as to return back to the small entrance door. I had two choices. Either would I stand there, still like a statue, praying for a  light or I would walk blindly, trying to find, on my own, the beam of the slightest light.

The more I was walking having my hands against the wall, the more I was praying that the platform not come to an abrupt end. I would find myself on the tracks or even worse in the depths of a gloomy well which would have opened its jaws especially for sucking me, twirling hungrily its dark tongue. As I was walking,  I understood that the platform was not a straight one but every now and then it turned slightly and it was full of curves and corners. I must have crossed quite a few metres, without knowing  at which place of the underground tube I was and most importantly where exactly I should go. And I had that strange feeling that the ground under my feet was becoming more and more slanting. In fact once or twice I slipped and  grabbed the wall. I was really desperate when my left hand, out of a sudden and while groping anguishly the wall, caught a metallic lump. I closed it in my palm to understand its shape. It looked like a small lever. This scared me more. What if by pulling that lever down, I would inadvertently open  the mouth of the evil monster which was waiting, hidden in the dark, for my wrong move to swallow me? Sweat droplets dribbled down my forehead. I swore at my stupidity which had sent me there and I decided to move on without pulling any lever. And the moment I was taking my hand away from the cold metal, I thought I heard something as crying. I didn’t need anything else to be absolutely frozen. It seemed as if time became still , that everything stopped to move, along with them my brain as well and that everything submerged in the absurd wilderness of that lament. My feet must have weighed more than all the trains  and my head was like an enormous bubble of void air. I was overwhelmed by chocking shouts which couldn’t come out of my throat. The cry became louder and there was no doubt that it was the cry of a baby or the cry of a lot of babies. I remembered all the stories I had heard for the Paris sewages. All who had descended down there, in the dedalus tunnels, got mad and were lost for ever, completely crazy from the cries of the unborn babies who had been thrown down in the drain system, haunting every pipe, every lid and every centimetre of the swamp down there.

Ah, I couldn’t take it any more! My hand pressed the lever down and in seconds the whole platform was lit by a dim yellowish light. I saw that there were also some other old  bulbs, nailed on the wall.

image: Fredrik Odman

The door (The clockwork boxes 3)

Almost running, I went down the two floors to the underground platform, being careful not to touch the black iron railing that was shining like a snake’s skin. The light was getting dimmer as I was descending more and more and the stairs opened their mouth entrance to their end. On the last stair the daylight had vanished and had been replaced by the yellowish colour of cheap gold. The huge fluorescent bulbs were screeching as if thousands of little insects had been trapped into their lids and now all of them were trying to organise their massive exit to the slow tidal wave of the suffocating atmosphere which was hugging like a lustful lover all the platform. I sighed a little scared but  I was determined  to amuse myself as a traveller of this endless underground tube. Its two sides were gapping open, totally black in front of me, the one on the left, the other one on the right. I started imagining mythical cities full of three headed beasts, hidden under the railtracks, breathing silently and talking in that language of resonances caused by the continuous banging of the metal railines. I had been down in the tube at nights too, waiting for some train and I know what I am saying. It is so freaking scary to know that the trains routes are getting less.,It’s even scarier what I can hear while waiting for them.

I wouldn’t have seen the small dark curving right where the stairs ended, if my leg hadn’t slipped somewhere, making me hold the railing tightly, bending over my whole body in order to keep my balance. And as I was trying not to fall down and be a funny clown for the other commuters, I saw a stack of a mysterious dust. A low black hill formed by the dust of an unknown metal or coal stamped and broken by someone. It was like charcoal chips. It showed incongruously symmetrical and quiet, in relation to all this dirt and rush. I was curious. I always used to be drawn by the most insignificant things for others, actually sometimes,- especially when I was younger-, I used to believe that there were some things that I was the only who could see them and whose existence could be confirmed only by me. These things might have existed only because they happened to have fallen into the fury of my observation. But they were completely invisible for the others or absolutely improbable to be noticed by someone else. The same with that dust now. 

I had bent over it looking closely the blackish mountain. It was left there, formed with geometrical accuracy right on the corner of a staircase, at a place that no leg could have stumbled on it. I rubbed some of the dust among my fingers and then I brought it to my nose. Some people were looking rather surprised at me wondering what on earth I was doing there like a dog on its four legs. It smelt like poppy seed but its  hard, as rock, texture made me sure that it wasn’t something like this. Without thinking I put some of it on the tip of my tongue, turning my back so that no one could see me. And right at the moment I was turning my back, towards the wall, I saw the open door..How strange..I had never seen that door and the strangest of all is that I  used to use the tube daily. I walked past the same spot again and again and I promise, I am a very observant person! A door isn’t something I wouldn’t have seen! And such a small door as if it is made for liliputean workers or passengers at the height of toddlers. I could not understand…I was standing surprised, looking magnetized at the black hole that appeared behind the door opening. And really I don’t know what it was that made me approach. I am not a particularly courageous person, or impatient to meet something seeming so threating by first sight. I could have left and then I would think all day long about this door and it sudden appearance there. I would probably come to the conclusion that it was my fault that I hadn’t seen it before.

I pushed the knuckle and the door creaked like a crying animal..


image: August Sander

The remnants of my fins (The clockwork boxes 2)

However, I have to  continue and explain precisely how I came across the clockwork boxes city. It is more than obvious to me now that it was a prearranged meeting and that after all I hadn’t stumbled by accident in that place. Something that I couldn’t understand very well then, drove me there. But it took me  a lot of time to realise. No meeting is really accidental. All meetings in life happen for some reason. My reason did not exist back then. It was necessary for me to create this reason on my own and blow over it like a little god, just to give my bored breaths a chance. Moreover, it took me time to understand a lot of things that were hidden inside me, so that I could be in the position to know that in the depths of my body, in the inner valleys of my bones, behind my fragile veins and the confusing roads of my ugly blood vessels, there is a dweller without multiple faces, without mirror reflections and mirage games, as I tended to believe until that very moment. There was only one man without many skin layers, a man who was eating his food calmly, scratching like a dog the dead cells- peeling like thin papers- behind his ear, talking without stop to his only and one self and  fighting with the third hand which was sprouting out of his chest..wild hand, threatening to grab him and suffocate him by throwing him at the floor like a fresh big fish. It was the time that I was convinced I could  find hidden remnants of fish scales on my naked body. I decorated my bathroom floor with a big curved mirror on which I used to lie, looking from a close distance every pore of my complexion, struggling to find remains from a forgotten fin and listening  carefully to my breathing, being certain that I could recognize in its gurgling complaining end, the throbbing traces from the secret gills which were spreading like a moss colony in my lungs.

What a revelation and what series of explosions did the sight of the deeper parts of my brain, bring ! Depths that I was the only one to know their existence in me, their waters stirred like dark lakes, every time I got upset or excited. A true revelation.

I was close to the tube entrance  heading for the left department, where the rolling stairs were. I was searching for some dimes in my pocket, thinking that once more I had forgotten to take my wallet with me. I was wondering what I could do, I had already been tired from walking. That day I had gone too far and now my feet felt too weak to carry me back all this way. It had started snowing, making me feel angrier for my absent-mindness. Of course the rolling stairs were stuck, it would be a strange thing to find them functioning properly. I had to go from the other stairs, the stairs which were all the time crowded by coughing people, running legs, pushing hands. These stairs made me feel the urge to stick my body onto the wall and not move from there, closing my eyes tightly. I preferred to swim on the central square pavement tiles with people around me laughing and throwing their coins in my hat, than be forced to descend these stairs. I hated them..  So much roughness, so much grey, so much squalor ..I could see the spits on them, a colony of spits under my feet, some time a giant saliva will run down these stairs rinsing us all to the nearest drain pipe.

Image: Jean Cocteau photographed by Irving Penn

The city of the clockwork boxes -1-

Have you ever been in a city whose residents live inside clockwork boxes? Does it sound strange? In a city full of square or rectangular or triangular boxes, wrapped by fancy papers and  colorful ribbons. Have you been in such a city? I suppose that the initial question may have been forgotten, maybe because I  myself  have a weak memory too. So, I am repeating it once more. Have you ever been in a city whose residents live in clockwind boxes? And I think that I forgot to say exactly where this clockwind mechanism is. First of all it is huge and it needs the strength of many men together in order to be winded and give the box its right function, whereas other times –something really strange- a sudden accidental push by only one person is enough! What was I saying? Ah, yes. If these memory break-ups continue to torment me then I am really wondering how I will be able to narrate what I want to narrate about this strange city.

It was one of those cold mornings that I don’t dare to go out and decide to stay home, in front of the fire place having my laptop as my only company. But at that day I couldn’t find peace anywhere. Everything was a source of annoyance. The way that the fire flames were creaking, how slow the internet connection was. Even the shapes of the clouds over my house were more sullen than usual. I was under the influence of one of those irritations which overwhelm me more and more often as I grow up and make me be less patient than I used to be. I got dressed quickly and I went out to walk. A stroll without any particular destination. I am one of those keen walkers who hum softly and sleepily all around the city streets as if they are giant insects, looking around and observing, with the veneration of an ant, the faces around them and every crack of the pavement under their feet. Everything is a miracle for these walkers and for me as well. Even when I have seen a thing a hundred times, I have this ability to feel inside me the unique weight of its  slightest change, this kind of change that others would need months or years to notice. I am already speaking as if I belong to a different race of people, the walkers’ race and in fact I am talking as if I consider my race as being superior in a way. But the fact is that I  know how to hide my narcissism well. Really though, I don’t think that a person can stand amazed and stunned in front of a door knuckle let’s say. This door knuckle is dappled with the drizzle traces today. It creaks a bit differently or is it just the same to the yesterday knuckle it was? Knowing that my eyes will stand at it and will notice its difference, sends secret shivers down my spine. I think that deep inside me I do admire myself for this ability. Everything is an endless source of constant excitement for me.

I am bubbling again! A person so lonely that finds the distant walks in the city so delightful what else can he do but bubble?

But I have to continue and tell you about the city of the clockwind boxes. It is much nearer than I think, if I may plunge my head in the surrounding air, the way birds plunge their little heads into the water. Then I can see this city looming majestic from the depths of an unknown horizon. It is more than enough  to feel that I tear the screen of the atmosphere around me and enter another one. A different  atmosphere. An  atmosphere with no air. I know it’s very difficult but I think that the secret lies in my abilities to have all my senses acute and fully working, like a giant machine  that is ready to tear me apart if I don’t pay attention to the direction of its drone and the warnings of its roars. These roars function as antennae, so if the sound should become clear, I can pretend that I am not afraid at all and give them a chance to show what they can do for me. This way I am able to see how far I can take it....[...............]

image: Irving Penn