The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Read Online Free Page B

forms took advantage of the liveliness they mimicked. Horses from the pictures of Stubbs in the Municipal Art Gallery neighed, tossed their manes and stepped delicately off their canvases to go to crop the grass in public parks. A plump Bacchus wearing only a few grapes strayed from a Titian into a bar and there instituted Dionysiac revelry.
    But only a few of the transmutations were lyrical. Frequently, imaginary massacres filled the gutters with blood and, besides, the cumulative psychological effect of all these distortions, combined with the dislocation of everyday life and the hardship and privations we began to suffer, created a deep-seated anxiety and a sense of profound melancholy. It seemed each one of us was trapped in some downward-drooping convoluted spiral of unreality from which we could never escape. Many committed suicide.
    Trade was at an end. All the factories closed down and there was wholesale unemployment. There was always the smell of dissolution in the air for the public services were utterly disorganized. Typhoid took a heavy toll and there were grim murmurs of cholera or worse. The only form of transport the Minister permitted in the city was the bicycle, since it can only be ridden by that constant effort of will which precludes the imagination. The Determination Police enforced a strict system of rationing in an attempt to eke out the city’s dwindling supplies of food as long as possible but the citizens lied freely about their needs and those of their dependants, broke into shops to steal and gleefully submitted to the authorities the forged bread tickets with which Dr Hoffman flooded the streets. After the Minister sealed off the city, our only news of the country outside the capital came from the terse, laconic reports of the Determination Police and the gossip of the few peasants who had the necessary credentials to pass the guards at the checkpoints with a basket or two of vegetables or some coops of chickens.
    Dr Hoffman had destroyed time and played games with the objects by which we regulated time. I often glanced at my watch only to find its hands had been replaced by a healthy growth of ivy or honey-suckle which, while I looked, writhed impudently all over its face, concealing it. Tricks with watches and clocks were pet devices of his, for so he rubbed home to us how we no longer held a structure of time in common. Inside the twin divisions of light and darkness there was no more segmentation, for what clocks were left all told a different time and nobody trusted them anyway. Past time occupied the city for whole days together, sometimes, so that the streets of a hundred years before were superimposed on nowadays streets and I made my way to the Bureau only by memory, along never-before-trodden lanes that looked as indestructible as earth itself and yet would vanish, presumably, whenever someone in Dr Hoffman’s entourage grew bored and pressed a switch.
    Statistics for burglary, arson, robbery with violence and rape rose to astronomical heights and it was not safe, either physically or metaphysically, to leave one’s room at night although one was not particularly safe if one stayed at home either. There had been two cases of suspected plague. By the beginning of the second year we received no news at all from the world outside for Dr Hoffman blocked all the radio waves. Slowly the city acquired a majestic solitude. There grew in it, or it grew into, a desolate beauty, the beauty of the hopeless, a beauty which caught the heart and made the tears come. One would never have believed it possible for this city to be beautiful.
    At certain times, especially in the evenings, as the shadows lengthened, the ripe sunlight of the day’s ending fell with a peculiar, suggestive heaviness, trapping the swooning buildings in a sweet, solid calm, as if preserving them in honey. Aurified by the Midas rays of the setting sun, the sky took on the appearance of a thin sheet of beaten gold like the