"Weirdos of the Low Countries"
In the Theater of the Deep Spine
Arp descends into the basement of the Insurance Building to behold a factory in full flurry, table after table of workers hefting lathes, drills, and sandblasters.
Unbidden, like a gas through a hidden vent congealing into thought when it touches his head, Arp thinks, and knows the thought lives in quotes, like he’s performing it for the benefit of an audience seated behind a one-way screen, “All my life, I’ve assumed that reality was impregnable. That only within a para-reality, a representation, a sandbox, could my actions have any effect at all… and yet now, at what could be the end of my life, or at least a moment of permanent cessation, an unrelieved pause, I have arrived in the Theater of the Deep Spine only to realize that, in fact…”
He realizes that all the workers have stopped their work, depositing puppets in various stages of completion on a long, high table—“a Last Supper kind of table,” Arp thinks, in the same dazed, practiced manner as before, like he agreed at the last minute to replace whoever these lines were written for—before taking their seats around the edges of the factory, beneath screens that retract into the ceiling.
“You see,” interrupts an animatronic Spine rolling out of the shadows on casters, “generations ago, during my first apprenticeship in Leiden, my earliest years of sitting and talking with you, Arp, along the canals, back in what we might today affectionately call the Dark Ages, I set in motion a new congress between Madness and Reason that, after long, hard experimentation, after years and decades and generations of experimentation, resulted in the development of an all-new means of reproduction. A means free of the terminal blemish borne by all those whose existence stems from the congress of the old—freedom not only from death and dying, though of course these have always been the terminal symptoms, but freedom from all oscillation as well. With your help, whether you knew it or not, I found a way to overcome the restless oscillation between Ages of Madness and Ages of Reason. All one and then all the other, over and over again, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis, Reform… Awakening… Deconsecration and Reconsecration again and again, until everyone’s dizzy but no one can get off the ride. Until there’s nothing left to see and yet nowhere else to look. Tonight I declare: never again.”
The Spine puppet, which Arp decides to refer to simply as Spine, though he promises to always remember that this isn’t the first or only version, forces him into a leather armchair that two servants roll out into the middle of what he knows he’s expected to call the Stage, and then continues talking, accusatorially, as if reading Arp a list of the crimes he’s committed and for which he will now stand trial. “The geography involved in this multi-century breeding program was complex, requiring the near-entirety of the Dutch Empire, excluding of course Indonesia, a land we firmly maintain that we know nothing about.
“The first order of business was to engage Uncle Family, noted South African torturer, to round up as many miscreants from the Transvaal as he could find.” Spine picks a puppet off the table—a bulky, hairy-shouldered man clad in leather stirrups and assless chaps. Fitting his hand inside the puppet’s hole, he continues, “And, well, to elide the specifics with a mind toward keeping tonight’s performance suitable for a general audience”—he picks up a naked male and female puppet with snarls of red thread spilling from their groins—“breed the old genitals off of them so as to make way for the new. Order and Disorder, War and Peace, Matter and Antimatter—these were the antinomies that the Secret of Art, as imparted by the very first Leopold in an Amsterdam prison at the outset of what we now call The Enlightenment, required us to find a way to bridge… a bridge that could not connect the Near Shore to the Far without a centuries-long commitment from Uncle Family.”
This line, apparently a classic from a well-known routine, earns applause and knee slaps, themselves perhaps somewhat performative.
“Of course,” Spine continues, after giving the audience a patronizing “simmer down” gesture and then dropping the puppets to squeeze the headrest of Arp’s chair, “a breeding program of such ambition, at such scale, could not be kept secret forever. The ways in which Uncle Family lured these unfortunates into his work-shed and then, let’s say, caused them to forget the Enlightenment, could not help but attract the attention of certain units within the Johannesburg and Cape Town police forces of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These units… well, if you’d known what they were like back then, you’d understand why even a hardened torturer like Uncle Family was reluctant to comply with their summons to the district court in Pretoria.”
***
The more Spine describes (and uses the full spectrum of available puppets to reenact) Uncle Family’s eventual extradition from South Africa and his trial at the Hague—unexpected parts of which earn boos, hisses, and wolf whistles—the more Arp remembers the Truth & Reconciliation Committee he visited upstairs in what he’d at that time been conditioned to call The Insurance Building. He starts to wonder, though he remains unsure whether this thought has any substance, if this entire play is a barely-masked allegory for the verdict that is about to be delivered on his own mostly unremembered role in the war that supposedly occurred at the bottom of the beanstalk.
“Am I,” Arp wonders aloud, “nothing but a common war criminal, awaiting my turn at the Hague?” The line, as he somehow knew it would, elicits the heartiest applause yet. “Or even”—he dares to go further—“is this, all of what’s happening right now, that very trial, occurring in real time and space, hastily masked, for the sake of decorum, by the trappings of the Theater of the Deep Spine?”
While the audience guffaws, Arp wonders—and something within him reflexively adds, “not for the first time”—whether he’s imprisoned here, a POW of sorts, a survivor of Mr. Derekis’ war but not a full escapee from it… forced now to behold again and again his own origin story, a story that, by virtue of being repurposed for Spine’s play, no longer bears any connection to his actual origins, even if, perversely enough, all of its particulars remain perfectly true.
***
“Therefore,” Spine continues, having let Arp say his piece, “the Secret of Art was revealed not all at once, not by any one Leopold in any one cramped office in the crumbling Habsburg days of prewar Zagreb, but rather again and again, in every era, as often as needed, up to and including—”
He points toward the ceiling in a gesture of overwhelming magnanimity, signaling that he’s reached the climax of the play, however little of its narrative has been resolved. Indeed, Arp has the sense that key parts of the narrative have been redacted, or that it took on a life of its own before many of those key parts had been worked out, like a baby that insists on being born, alive if not well, long before it’s due.
Spine points again at the ceiling, growing agitated, until an offstage attendant takes the cue to pull a rope which causes a flap to open and a bevy of maned lion heads to fall. They pile up on the ground and lie there in silence, as if waiting to ripen.
Then, responding to a nod from Spine, the audience—my judges, Arp thinks, though no one’s listening to him any more—rises and moves in formation toward the pile, where they pick up the heads and pull them over their own so that, when they form a circle around Arp, it appears that fifty Leopolds have banded together to guarantee that, this time, when they reveal the Secret of Art, he won’t misinterpret any aspect of what they mean.
***
While the post-show melee winds down, Arp considers that perhaps he’s sitting in the Berkshire Film Studies main auditorium watching Spine’s senior project—a stop-motion film cleverly, if a bit clunkily, disguised as a prison play. He rises and, eager to leave before Spine corners him to ask for his grade, he goes behind a curtain and into a modest apartment that seems to be have been set aside for his use. My after-show relaxation room, he thinks. A small but critical kindness.
There’s a cot on one side, next to a bookcase with a few James and Eliot volumes and a battered copy of The Go-Between on a shelf beneath a potted plant. A two-burner stove, student fridge, and toaster stand across from it, beneath a small window that seems to look out onto an air shaft or garbage chute. Allowing that this may be the cell to which the Hague has sentenced him, he lies down on the bed, opens The Go-Between, and nods off after reading part of the Preface.
When he closes his eyes, he thinks back over what he read. In his memory, it went as follows:
I confess everything, Arp. I led us out of the world and into a broom-closet beside or beneath it. A side-world, an eddy, an oxbow. I know what I did, and I want you to know that I know, and that I don’t blame you for empowering me to do it. At the very least, I hope you’ll accept my hospitality here. Uncle Family will be in to see to your needs in the morning. Tomorrow morning and every morning thereafter.
Sincerely,
The Deep Spine.
PS: Within the scheme of the New Breeding, you are my father to the same degree that I am yours. In time, we may both come to see what this means.
***
Unable to sleep, Arp rises and carries the book across the room, intending to check the Preface for the confession he knows he won’t find there. But before he does so, he stands at the window and looks out at what now appears to be the seafloor he crossed on his return to the States, after meeting Leopold in that office tower in Zagreb. He studies what may be no more than an artist’s rendition of that sacred geography, a hotel-kitsch reproduction of a once-salient part of the world, or the underworld—either that, or perhaps it’s the set for another puppet play, tomorrow’s or the day after’s.
He looks away and reaches inside his pajama pants, curious to check whether the play’s account of the transmutation of human genitalia applies to him as well. Order and chaos, he thinks, probing what he finds. Tan felt and red thread. Matter and antimatter. Self-sufficiency such that Spine engendered me and I him, neither of us distinct enough to convince the Hague that we ought to be allowed to live out our lives as individuals.
As he returns to bed, leaving the book unopened on the sill, he can’t shake the feeling that he should’ve tried harder to mount some defense, or to flee if that defense failed. Yet, as he drifts off—and seems to end up just outside the window, on the seafloor—he can no longer dredge up any aspect of what that defense would’ve entailed, nor even, frighteningly, the slightest image of any place to which his flight might’ve taken him.