PAUL WEST
557
vibration. On the one hand, it might be a massive pipeline containing
water or oil, water for the Samarkand canal system or oil for some
secret missile base-no, not oil, but rocket fuel, heavy water, it might
be anything: protein-impregnated mercury, molten diamonds, white–
hot lava from the bowels of some eminent volcano. On the other hand,
it might be quite solid, sayan underground girdle round the earth, or
the USSR at least, made of ivory or some other bone. Most of all,
though, it feels organic, living, like the longest and thickest dildo in
the world, something with which to pleasure the bottomless craters in
the ocean floor. But, I ask myself, where is the point in that? Why the
superheated secrecy, why the darkness, the palpable absence of words?
It
must be something of colossal ingenuity and eon-shaking force.
Whoever designed it must have had some fun, mustn't he, and the
prisoners who built it-assuming it
was
built-must have wondered at
its purpose, presumably never having seen the thing either in part or in
its entirety.
On we move, inching our way like pedestrians in some political
allegory inch their way along the streets with faces to the walls, and
time not so much passes as dissolves. Furtively, I lick the surface of the
thing and the taste is waxy and this could just be the mother of all
tallow candles, giant white obelisk horizontal beneath the red sands of
the Kizil Kum, awaiting the call to action, when the lights go out all
over the world and the Soviet Union has this, will light such a candle
that all nations will thenceforward pay a dawn-tax. I try to bite a piece
off, but there is no purchase for the teeth; they slip and skid. Stabbing
with a finger is no good either, nor jabbing with the elbow nor even a
powerful knee-thump. The thing is invulnerable, even to interpreta–
tion.
Where Handy Man is, I have no idea; he must be down here still,
shu££ling his way in company with the rest of us, his head no doubt
bursting with all the things he dare not say, with his anticipation of all
the questions I cannot even put to him, and with the latest authorized
version of Unseen-by-itself #1:
-Kak vy pazhevyetye?
Clumsy Russian for How're yuh doin'?
Unseen-by-itself #1 has no pronoun, having no noun.
Well then: Hi!
Is unaddressable.
But nonetheless addresses?
Nothing but silence, into which I now shout as loud as I can:
-Trotsky!
An unkempt-feeling hand squeezes itself aginst my mouth, one of
