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 Building plansHans Pienaar"Cavorting with Kevorkian." The phrase has been reverberating between the walls of my skull. Ever since I saw the clip in the TV news of a panel van parked in front of a police station, containing the body of the latest patient of the "suicide doctor". Panel vans have always had the allure of the sinister for me. When you see them, chances are they'll be dashing around corners after people with baseball caps have loaded flimsy things such as carpentry off-cuts into them. Always on some other business than that emblazoned on their sides. At any other time I would have recognised the grotesquerie, the death doctor's obsession with the criminality of the deed, the hints of lower-world connections, assisted suicides as a banal Mr Fixit answer to the human condition. But I, too, want to die. If it means that I shall have to embrace the evil, the rot, the moral disintegration, then let it be. I have the right to die. I can't go on like this. If this is my fate, if this is what it has all come down to, then at least let me have the freedom of one last act of will: to get myself killed. How? Bring in the panel vans! Let them surround me. Let my parts be carried in a hundred vehicles all over the country. Let Kevorkian's pipes, which he is said to always leave in the vans with the bodies, like medical discards after an operation, run in and over me in their maggoty way. Not that I would need any. I am practically filled with piping already, piping that crawls in and out of me and leaves no part of me untouched, connecting one machine to another with me as the medium, piping that can carry anything, from poison to explosives. The medium? Yes, that is what I have been reduced to, the medium as the message, to be even more precise. The message? Just look at me, and you will be at a loss for a tactful answer. Run-down. Decrepit. Senile. Dead on my feet. Over the wall. No dressing up can hide it. No length of ribbon hung about me can cheer me up. Powder or paint can conceal the cracks in the facade they have devised for me to hold up to the city and the citizens, but they cannot close them. If there is a puzzling question it has to do with this. Why don't the city and the citizens get the message? Why do they insist that I am still young and ever rejuvenable when I know that my last days are here, that I cannot continue in this way? And if they can't look with their eyes and see what they see, why don't they listen to their hundreds of instruments all plugged into me somewhere? How many buttons do they have to press to see that things simply don't work, and never will again? How many times must they get lost in the labyrinths of my intestines, how many times pinch their noses to escape the smells of decades, the result of stalled osmosis suffused in the very linings of my being? As you can see, I am severely disillusioned. And if they don't want to pay attention to my looks, what about the company I keep? All sorts are attracted to me. They feed off me. They draw water from my leaky outlets. They rummage in my effluvium. Their smoky breaths leave black marks on me that the city and the citizens will probably explain away as beauty spots. I am severely disillusioned. But I must also admit, as I struggle with these questions, that part of that disillusionment is with myself. With my arrogance. My always knowing better. Always believing that I can fix things on my own. And always believing that I understand human beings. A curse on them and their unpredictable ways! A curse on their brains which can devise a whole world around them but not make their plans for their own lives work out. These walking containers of liquid and ideas suspended on the grids of neurotic electrons in a sponge in their heads. Can't they even see how I hate them? I mean, really. How do you think with a sponge? All the muck that gets soaked up when you squeeze it ... Such a brain once lay on my doorstep, so to speak, when I was still bright and young and bared to the world in my nakedness. There was this motor-cycle rider who came dashing down the street. I lay there, proud at the looks of wonderment and curiosity that he gave me, when suddenly he had to swerve for an oncoming vehicle, and hit a telephone pole with his head. He didn't have his helmet on, and his head was split open in neat halves that revealed this amazing ... creature, is the only word I have for it. It looked like the inlaid bodies of dead rat babies, all convoluted and wrenched into and over one another. A terrible sight that I now realise must have been one of the defining traumas of my life. Merciful, I want to call it, merciful is the way the other, similar occasions turned out. Three different workers who were working on me suffered such fates, their skulls crushed underneath a steel plate, a load of bricks falling from the heavens, a crane-lift racing to the earth ... but no scattered brains, just a trickle of blood claying the dust. Rats! That is what these humans are. Their ideas are like stillborn rat babies, cradled by their skulls. And when they do survive and get out in the fresh air, it's too late, they have grown up into the distorted adult animals with their ratty wiles and deceptions and evil burrowing ways. The worst is that I am an idea of theirs, as are all my colleagues hunkering down in the cold city centre around me, stretching for a little sunlight like the ancient ones in a forest. Old before our time. I had my fifteen minutes of fame, when I set the tone in new architecture. Just fifteen. It seems as if the shadows started creeping the very next day, shadows of new hulks looming over me, leering over me in their awful skeletal terror, because unlike people, we start out as skeletons and then disintegrate into a mass of bricky cells. Shadows pushing us into forgetfulness with banalities like greater height, more space, deeper foundations, greater appetites for dagha, brick, gravel, steel ... The writing was on the wall then already, but I didn't see it. Nor did I realise that the dry rot was starting even then. Imagine some malignant growth - a mutant rat baby if you will - in a human being's command centre deciding one day that from then on only white cells would be allowed to enter, say, its stomach. OK, so the simile is rather a silly one, because white cells can't do without their workhorses, the red cells. But you get the idea, and its absurdity. Only certain people, the ones who used me the most, and ensured that I was a fully operational entity and not one filled with nauseating brains only, were allowed to enter me! They put in booms. They put in turnstiles. The modus operandi was very cleverly worked out in a ratty sort of way. Instead of the Liftriders carrying the marks of distinction and privilege, it was every (r)MDUL¯(r)MDNM¯persona non grata who had to carry a book. Instead of being allowed to vanish in the mass, it was they who were meticulously recorded. The most vital installation, the first of many, was an extra set of lifts. These carried the Cardholders whose non-entry passes were cancelled by guards for work in my recesses like microbes in a stomach. The guards filled several storeys with useless paper work, but never serviced, never overhauled the lifts with the latest technology, never even cleaned them. The reason for this was even more absurd than the wrong-way-round card system: by making these lifts as dangerous and unpleasant as possible, I discovered, my controllers believed they would persuade the Cardholders to use the stairs and, eventually, to start avoiding the whole of me out of sheer exhaustion. The original lift, by contrast, was decorated in wooden panels and carried portraits intended, I hypothesise, to rescue the visages of the top-dog human beings from the ghastly processes of decomposition to which all of them are doomed. I had plenty of time to study these processes. In fact, in the north-eastern-most foundation of my neighbour you would find the skeleton of a man murdered while both of us were still in our infancy. It gave my neighbour the heebie jeebies, this foreign body so different from his own bones of steel, but I found the various stages of metamorphosis into the skeleton curled up like an insect reason for hope that human beings might still approach the geometric perfection of our own grids and girders in their future evolution. There was much, much more of this devotion to decay in the vacant lots to which the Cardholders were directed. The sheets of iron under which they shacked up had the same rippled texture of their ratty brains. Hundreds, thousands of them ... how I despised them, not for the futility of the curses they whispered against my walls like errant Jews, nor the ammoniacal writings with which they singed my doorways after their paltry attempts to escape into drunken oblivion, but because they were the ones who embodied what false, contradictory, treacherous creatures human beings are. They were the living exposés of the Liftriders who believed they ruled over the realm of the pure line, the linear function, the harmonious ensemble, the working geometry which is my second nature ... When they computerised me, these things became my default, so to speak. But the Liftriders chose to take the credit for themselves - totally, but utterly totally blind to murder and mayhem among the dishevelled mobs outside, whose baby rat mass grave brains devised desperate plots pathetic in their elaboration to grab the next meal's bread from each other. It was clear to everyone that this massive contradiction, meticulously recording every Cardholder's particulars and at the same time erasing any extra details about their lives with equally elaborate evasion, was a blueprint for disaster, apart from the galling effect it had on brick-honest existences like myself. So I tried to shake some sense into them, the Liftriders, with a series of tremors that rattled the cocktail shakers in their top-floor penthouse and a shiver of a window-pane that drew at least one secretary to gaze out into the disaster surrounding her. But to no avail. Instead of insight into their true natures, fear gripped them. That would have been OK, because one would normally expect a person in fear to take steps to prevent its recurrence. But horror, and its black humour variations, I have come to understand, is one of the pleasures craved instead of avoided by human beings. They dreamed about these tremors, almost longing for such catastrophes to happen to them so that the fear and horror could shove them into each other's arms like in the movies. Not only that. Believing that the tremorising was not sufficient, I continued with it, until the were reams of intellectualising in the papers, and a box office boom in such childlike vulgarities as the Tunnel of Love or Jumping Castles. I stopped this, but I did not give up. Some deep thinking was necessary, which ended in an if-you-can't-beat-them-then-join-them type of strategy. Maybe what they needed wasn't an injection of chaos, but more control. If I wanted them to look outward, I had to enable them to see themselves first. Alas, it was another mistake. Because what followed was the age of surveillance. I allowed them to set up closed-circuit cameras everywhere, to bury microphones under my plaster skins, and plant spies among each other. The effect was to actually increase the airconditioned isolation inside my walls by a factor of several magnitudes. Their gazes turned inward, you see. Their guards ended up studying endless reels of nothing, gazing at me, in fact, over and over, at my empty walls, my ignored ceilings, my forgotten corners, listening to my most gratuitous gurglings and sighings: a huge expanse of nothingness was the record of their hi-tech non-exertions ... much like astronauts delivering useless dirt from the navel of the anorexic moon. All the while the Liftriders continued as if nothing had happened. When they got bored, they overhauled the building. The interior decoration, that is. Now you might think that being jacked up in one's interior is a futile exercise, much like human beings putting lipstick on the insides of their mouths, or carpeting the insides of their soles, or painting their oesophagus, but I couldn't deny that every time it was a pleasant experience. So much so, that I had become increasingly irritated by their latter-day neglect of my outside. Tiles were falling off and killing members of the mob down below, messing more blood everywhere. Patches of plaster flaked off my top storeys, and winds became asthmatic from the grains of sand sucked from the exposed mortar work. Desperate words in incoherent typographies were gouged into my cornerstones. To my and everyone's surprise, though, this neglect proved to be the catalyst to the changes that did follow. It was a sort of knee-jerk reaction from me that did the trick, and not all the deep thought and analysis. I'll show them, I thought. If they want me to be ugly, I'll become even more ugly. I noticed that human beings disliked nothing more than facial hairs. They put them in pictures to frighten their children to bed. So I began to grow grass. Seeds there were always, but they never came in sufficient quantities to make a good showing. With the intricate system of eddies my neighbours and I had devised to keep ourselves cool, I managed to draw the seeds from everywhere into my gutters and the cracks that had been forming in all my walls. Similarly, sand and water were transported from the vacant lots the mobs had dug up to mimic the vast fields of the Liftriders' pen pals beyond the horizon. Before long the photographers appeared, with their telephoto lenses and tripods and flashes. Photographers! It emerged they had been sent by the Liftriders to take pictures for the bosses inside to assess my image. Couldn't they step outside themselves and just look! Were they so determined to avoid the mobs? To make a long story short, they launched an extensive campaign to get rid of the grass. They had mountaineering clubs scale my facades with their little ice-picks scratching at the grassroots. They had competitions for children to collect seeds instead of bottle tops. Swarms of pigeons were trained to ignore scraps of fast food and go for seeds. Women were encouraged to avoid wearing silk stockings that could catch seeds, and only movies with barelegged actresses were passed by the Inspectorate of Publication Prohibitions Downturned Appeals. Disinformation was spread about grass. Most effective were the fast forward films in which grassroots were shown to act just like tapeworms, those horrible things gnawing at animals' and humans' insides, crawling underground to infiltrate every little bit of soil there is. They were taking over the world, the propaganda said, in fact, they were already the most successful life form on earth, but weren't satisfied and wanted ever more ... zoom in on the moustaches sticking up over my rusted gutters. They even showed bush fires from all over the world, contending that grass needs fire to renew itself, fire that would consume everything else until there was only a flat black desert left, the antithesis of the heights of civilisation human beings have reached with their skyscrapers. The propaganda, as always, had the opposite effect. The Mobsters' leader was a shrewd man, and coolly dissected the propaganda and reassembled it to his own advantage. What they don't tell you, he reasoned, is that wheat is grass too. Has anybody of you heard any mention of wheat, he asked rhetorically. No, the mobbed shouted, louder, and louder, no wheat, no wheat. That is because they don't want you to have it. No wheat, no wheat, shouted the mob, and to the very end that would become their rallying cry, incomprehensible as it was to the outsiders who still visited me. Because they don't want you to even have bread, he shouted. Surely that is the last straw! Every seed that is destroyed, he raged, is a crumb wrested from the pinch of a child. Every husk blown into the wind is a crust denied the jowls of a dog. Every grain pulverised under the butt of a gun is a globule of spit sucked from the thirsty man's tongue. Every stem plucked is like a nipple ripped from the lonely man's lips. No wheat, no eat! No wheat, no eat! shouted the mob. I watched this with amazement and not a little trepidation. Things had become chaotic. Until the solution hit me like a thunderbolt hop-scotching from shack to shack on a roof. If harmony is impossible among human beings, let them fight. If there is no bread, let them eat their own blood. I became an agent provocateur, setting up one side against the other. For the Liftriders I pretended I had sick building syndrome. My airconditioning ducts would suddenly begin to rasp, and plant thoughts of bronchitis in their heads. Which a number of Liftriders duly got. My carpets cackled with static electicity, flipping switches in computers, shocking workers out of their trances of concentration, continuously setting kettles on the boil so that their alarmist whistles spread anxiety down every passage. They would find fields of grass peppered with poppies on their screensavers when they logged on in the morning. They would find pornographic rhymes in their e-mail about seed spilling over penises in manicured hands. Grassy smells and tastes revealed themselves in their wine, perfumes and the cookies they bought for tea. I proliferated their cubicle labyrinths, shuffling the carpenters' plans when they weren't looking, so that employees got lost for hours on end doing the simplest of jobs, like taking a document somewhere. The elite, the Liftriders themselves, found their elevators developing quirky habits. They skipped floors, snapped doors shut in front of annoyed noses, leaked alien liquids, creaked and squealed and even succeeded in making one person seasick with their bobbing. The Liftriders eventually had two permament teams trying to fix all their lifts, but they couldn't keep up, with the shooting-themselves-in-the-foot that at any time at least four of the dozen lifts were out of action, sending streams of people warming and caressing the innards of my stairwells. As for the mobs, there was little I could add to their misery for the purposes of goading them to confrontation. It was not long before the first bombs appeared. I aided their execution by leaving an entrance open sometimes, or by wafting the smell of fresh bread through an air duct in order to lead the guerrillas to the most suitable niches in my innards, where the ripped piping and black coatings of ash after a bombing would make the most impressive press. At first I was a little fearful, because one could never predict what kind of damage would be done to me, but my powers of pure reasoning got me out of that one too. Even if they were to blow me apart, send every brick flying into the streets and the last speck of cement drifting to the other side of the earth, there would be no lasting damage. Bombs and buildings are made of the same stuff, you see. Straight chemicals, no trace of organic slobber and slither and slother. What's more, my essence, my spirit resides in the blueprints and plans they drew up. I would always remain behind, as the faintest of ghosts maybe, only a collection of washed-out lines on oily paper, but always ready to be resurrected by the flick of a wrist signing a new contract. Soul - is what I shall name it? Which is what human beings don't have. Don't come to me with chromosomes and genes. There is no predictability there, no repeatability, no prefocussing process which is the essence of spirituality. When their lonely ova wander in the crowds of sperm, everything is left to chance: the odds for this or that, for a genius or deviant mutation, are so incalculable that not even the shadow of spirit is possible. And the Liftriders knew that. Which is why they gave up. How would their own seed, their own grassroots react to future circumstances? They would always be different from themselves. There was no way they could control the future. All that was left was to take the money and run. The Liftriders in their penthouse, gazing onto the clouds over the sugar-coated rims of their cocktail glasses, were no match really. They had become too spoilt. It was the easiest of manipulations, to encourage them in their trains of thought by suddenly clicking open a secret safe, where they would find wads of cash ready for the taking. Another favourite was gathering equipment in a room, and having somebody chance upon them, with that loss of breath and speechlessness that is so delightful to watch in human beings. It was then that the talk began of moving into another building. What a pleasant jolt this gave me, almost sending me into another tremor. That was the least I could expect, let alone hope for. Getting rid of all the humans in one go! For a change, I was the one holding my breath, and for weeks I actually stopped all my machinations, for fear of disturbing the further development of this idea, which had moved from the cocktail circuit into the short circuit of the cantankerous chairman's brain. Just imagine the prospects. All alone, the solitary squares and cubes that were rooms and windows, safe and pure within my frames. The only life beautiful insects showing off their intricate structures, which are inside out and not outside in like those of perverse human beings. But mostly solitude, a hundred winds whistling through my girders and window holes. Fresh air everywhere, expressing its own free spirit in wild swirls and twirls. No more airconditioning! No more stifling carpets and wallpaper! Even the stone carvings in my lobby would be released, and sing of solitude like only stones from the Karoo can sing! I did my best. I gave the word "new", which now had become one of the most oft-used, a pleasant tinge of an echo whenever it was voiced within my confines. I reflected rosy tints onto the clouds at which the cocktail shakers would gaze in their penthouse. Surprise did turn into hope when the first mob delegation ascended to the chairman's office, putting up a show of being used to lifts, pretending to have ridden them all their lives. Needless to say, I did everything in my power to play the part of facilitator, having hastily dropped the one of provocateur. The rest, I suppose, is history. The mobs and the Liftriders found each other. Endless discussions were held about moving into a new building and starting a new life together. There was endless applause from everywhere, and the crowds watching movies on the mine-dump drive-ins flickered their lights like a flat battery version of aurora borealis. Alas. I should have guessed. The Liftriders in their balaclavas continued with their backdoor schemes, but were now joined by members of the mob delegations. I thought these people were merely on the lesser levels of humanity, and that this would not change anything in the grand pattern of things, which was that I would very soon be rid of them and return to my pristine state. The strange thing was that the cause was not the mobsters' becoming Liftriders too, but human beings' perverse conception of nostalgia. As plans were being drawn up, scenarios sketched and budgets detailed, notes of sadness were detectable in ever-growing intensities. It came as a shock to me when I made the final interpretation and after double-checking found that my reading of the signs was right. They wanted to continue in the old way! They had come to love the daily struggle with breakdowns, the daily clashes with each other, the irritations, the niggles and squirms and wiggles and headaches and hay fever and depressions and ulcers and all the contemptible shit human beings have in their lives. They wanted more of this, not less! Even as they argued about this, a different writing sweated on my walls. Because the arguing itself, of course, made the point. They were like married couples, the Liftriders and the mob delegations: it seemed as if they started bickering for the sole purpose of enabling them to kiss and make up in the end and jump eagerly into their squeaky beds together. They set up huge public rituals, where especially the Liftriders recounted with undertones of pride barely concealed below the surface, tedious tale after tedious tale of how their henchmen murdered and hacked and stabbed and tortured and burnt, until the reams of testimony began to bulge from my cellar windows, making paper ears waiting in vain to be pulled. Meanwhile, instead of waning, the mob numbers grew and grew. A small proportion became Liftriders, but the vast majority continued in their misery. Only now they were everywhere, inserting themselves in the smallest crack opening up in the most hardened mortar filling, in the most aloof attic, on the most lagful ledge ... in the lift wells, even, for chrissakes, living like lemurs on top of the cages. And the Liftriders, solemnly genuflecting and saluting and bowing and scraping before their testimony tantalisers, ignored them! It was as if all I had gone through with them had never happened. Back came the dresser-uppers. New interior decorating came first. Airconditioning returned with a vengeance and a thousand new bugs. New portraits, new carpets, all over again, but still the same in the end. On the outside, they covered me in all the colours of the spectrum, to underline the new dispensation, in which any old spectral analysis was now accepted. Spectra and prisms breaking them open were the new icons. And just about everybody succumbed to them, as if they were paving the way to new cosmic importances much like crooked scientists bullshit people about the Egyptian pyramids as beacons for godlike types who were supposed to have dropped human beings on earth in order to civilise it. I mean, human beings as harbingers of civilisation! There was no clear announcement. Gradually I came to the realisation that I was of no significance any more, as the grime and slime took over and lichens and mosses and fungi and grasses of all sorts began to cover me. Now the real rats gnaw at me, day in and day out, puncturing my intestines, engraving my bones with their animal signs, snapping my nerves like macaroni sticks, stopping my pores up with their defecation ... Now the shadows of oblivion have spread to my very heart and soul, influencing everything like the water table sucking on my foundations with its toothless gums. I am depressed as hell. My thoughts have become as asinine as those of human beings. Puerile phrases pop up in my laser tubes. Cavorting with Kevorkian, Eulogising Euthanasia, Soporific Suicide, Dancing Death ... I want to die, but I am not allowed to. I can't; as a matter of fact, I don't know how to, actually. And they keep my plans locked up in their vaults. Even if they don't have a clue about the name of the game, that doesn't mean they don't hold the trump card. Condemned to live, that is what I am. In a state of Euthanasia Frustrasia, to coin a phrase. The least I can hope for is that one of the kinder human beings would write that on a wall somewhere.
LitNet: 01 July 2004
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