Motorman Read online

  MOTORMAN

  David Ohle

  1972

  Introduction

  For a long time I was scared to read Motorman. It had come recommended to me in such hushed tones that it sounded disruptively incendiary and illegal. Not only would the reader of this crazed novel burn to ashes, apparently, but he might be posthumously imprisoned for reading the book-—a jar of cinder resting in a jail cell. Books were not often spoken of so potently to me, as contraband, as narcotic, as ordnance. There was the whispered promise that my mind would be blown after reading Motorman. There was the assurance that once I read it I would drool with awe, writerly awe, the awe of watching a madman master at work, David Ohle, awesomely carving deep, black holes into the edifice of the English language.

  I was, to say the least, guarded and jealous of it in advance, protesting the very idea of Motorman. Its existence bothered me, and I grew leery of being artistically paralyzed by its reported high oddity and invention, its completely unexampled decimation of fiction-as-we-have-come-to-know-it. At the time, when I and the few writers I knew fantasized more about how readers might react to what we wrote than what exactly we might write-—our readers would be sprung aloft and unable to land, rendered gummy and mute, form an army, start a new language, or simply melt into malleable form so that we could use this “reader spackle” to build an outdoor shelter in Duluth-—Ohle's reader response behavior was the pinnacle of what I thought could be achieved. His fans were so serene. In non-confrontational tones, they could casually remark that he was the best out there, the strangest, oddest, most original fiction writer no one had ever heard of. The most dismaying aspect of their allegiance was their seeming indifference to whether or not I ever read the novel-—in fact, it seemed that they might prefer it if I refrained. More spoils for them, after all. Too many readers might ruin the book. This anti-missionary approach turns out to be the best recruiting tactic of all. Ohle's readers behaved as if they never had to read another inventive fiction writer again. They had read the sort of book that finally satisfied the thirst, a final book that could behave as a sort of source bible for anything that might come afterward-—the creation text for all new fiction. I might try to tell them about some other writer, possibly equally as obscure, intense, and wild, and they would listen politely, say “huh,” and then assure me that whoever I was lamely sponsoring had nothing on Ohle. Ohle was onto some sublime weirdness that he achieved so easily it was as if he was writing behind his own back. His very sentences seemed equipped with tracers that generated secondary and tertiary amazements in the wake of the primary spectacle. Ohle was the dogsbody that resulted from a glandular mishap between Flann O'Brien, Leonora Carrington, Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler, Borges, and Raymond Roussel. That is, if those writers had all been alive at the same time and partying together at the same organ swap.

  And the kicker was always the rumor (still unverified) that Ohle worked in Kansas for William S. Burroughs, transcribing the man's dreams every morning.

  In other words, David Ohle was reported to be the custodian for the subconscious of William S. Burroughs.

  One might fittingly wonder what that job interview was like, but that is a curiosity best saved for another time. One suspects, soon perhaps, a rash of one-act plays to bring the idea to life for us.

  I finally read Motorman, cautiously, moving through its dark pages with a mixture of suspicion and anxiety, waiting for aphasia to strike. I soon discovered the book to be more suspicious and anxious than I was, swollen with a mixture of dread and apathy, a world that showed a healthy disrespect for physics and the laws of biology. But not sci-fi. Not magical realist. Not anything but itself. It was far more story-driven than I expected it to be, much more located in a character and his struggles, even if that character had four sheep's hearts inside his chest and had a penchant for smoking stonepicks. I must have been expecting, in the pages of Motorman, a new alphabet, a demanding, unintelligible, ferociously experimental and annihilating text that would bitch-slap my language processing abilities until I had succumbed to a boneless heap on my reader's carpet, moaning in Spanish. But I discovered an oddly tender book that used imagination as an afterthought, however potently, as if beautiful fires on the horizon are precisely the backdrop that might restore life to our identity-quest stories and make us care again about the most elemental things. Extreme imagination, for Ohle, was simply the atmosphere in which a primal story of loss could breathe most freely.

  I did not die or even catch fire during this bout of reading, although I did discover that Ohle had created, if not an influence over the fiction that would come after Motorman, then a shadow that could not be ignored, a reminder that some of our most provocative directions in fiction are too intense and scorching to be followed by others. So while it might be true that Ohle burned the road after him, that heat has cooled enough for a new generation to travel over it, to once again read a groundbreaking book that looks no less novel now, over thirty years after it first appeared. Thanks to this heroic reprint by 3rd bed, his older admirers can once again sponsor him to a new legion of readers, and the Ohle vocabulary and scaffolding can re-enter the bloodstream of the culture.

  It is curious that a reprint could be heroic. It is more curious that a book this good could go out of print so quickly. And it is most curious that an introduction would even be required for a novel that, if you examine it carefully in the right kind of light, might actually be seen to be steaming.

  I would venture that had Motorman not been published, but instead shown at an art gallery, page by page plastered to the walls maybe, its cachet and value would not be in question, and Ohle would now be regarded as a vital conceptual artist of the seventies, akin to someone who built a behavior cannon out of bent plywood that pelted pedestrians with one of the seven leading emotions, each emotion equipped with a fur backing and a set of workable teeth. That Ohle did something like this, but purely with language, eschewing bricks and mortar, seems even more amazing, yet it's not something that usually happens in a book, and this might partially account for its resulting obscurity. When a book gets called “experimental,” you can hear a ghetto opening up to swallow it, the sound of a few nickels falling into the author's pocket, whereas experimentation is a given in visual and other kinds of art. It is expected. Without it there is regionalism, or, more simply, crap. Without fevered ambition, you have competent seascapes hanging in the hotel lobby, ass-relaxing music playing in the elevator. Without the desire to produce something unexampled in the art form, you have books that are cynical blueprints for the movies that will bring them to life. You have characters with beards playing hockey.

  Visual artists have critics, ostensibly, while innovative writers have, for the most part, reviewers, whose job it is ever more frequently to determine the cost-benefit of purchasing the book, using heart-crushing standards such as beachtime readability, difficulty, sameness, narrative drive, and superficiality (more, please!). Or they are hen-pecked jacket copy plagiarists, dutifully paraphrasing publicist's pitch letters in their newspapers. But rather than remark on the obvious cultural conditions (or lack thereof) that have rendered many artistic writers (as opposed to, uh, other kinds of writers) marginal, based on their low sales-—The people don't lie!-—while visual artists, who might not sell what they make to even one person, can work at the limits of their art without the overt burden of audience pleasure (read: Snickers and Cheez Doodles) in mind, it seems better to be pleased that this book is back in the hands of people who might read it for themselves. This is what matters. It is not difficult, unnecessarily challenging, minor, or needlessly cerebral. Motorman is a central work, pulsing with mythology, created by a craftsman of language who was seemingly channeling the history of narrative when he wrote it. It is a book about the f
uture that comes from the past, and we are caught in its amazing middle.

  If we had to label it, Motorman might be called apathy noir, a gasless detective story minus the detective, set inside a hollowed-out egg, with flashlight shadows roving the shell. The inventions and fabulations-—the double suns, the fake years-—seem to flow from Ohle's left hand, which is to say that his bursts of oddity are never showcased, but rather incidental and downplayed, as if they might not really be happening, and this distinguishes him from many concept-driven sci-fi writers who are eager to lacquer their imaginations to a full gloss and create a museum spectacle of their concepts.

  At the level of story, Motorman is a digressive escape narrative, with a vaguely persecuted main character of the sort one might find in Kafka. But while Kafka's bureaucratic settings were clinical, grey, and typically consonant with architectural reality, Ohle has embellished his world with impossible weather, illogical time structures, and enhanced surveillance powers, including bursts of craziness and color that might have embarrassed poor Kafka. It's fitting that Ohle quotes Escher, whose fabulist, escape-free structures are much like what Moldenke, Motorman's hero, discovers as he travels through a territory called “the bottoms.” Escher created images that appear logical and coherent on paper, but could not exist in three dimensions. They perfectly assert the purity of imagined space, the intractability of what can be conceived. They argue that the third dimension should be called “disappointment.” Ohle, too, is expert at contriving logical veracity for the most impossible scenarios. His delivery is droll and often bloodless, from the side of his mouth, and thus the strange happenings of his story appear strangely true. Adjectives are anathema to Ohle. Precision and clarity are all. He is mathematical and concise in his descriptions, never wasting a word. And he favors the short, one-sentence paragraph.

  Which has a way of knocking you over the head, creating propulsion into even the most strangely decorated narrative tunnels.

  The narrative tunnels which, when you turn the page, you will enter for yourself.

  To read Motorman now is to encounter proof that a book can be both emotional and eccentric, smeared with humanity and artistically ambitious, messy with grief and dazzling with spectacle. Do not think, however, that you are entirely protected reading it, although I can mostly vouchsafe about the claims of cindering. At this time, chances are fairly good that you will not burn.

  Now you're on your own.

  Ben Marcus 2004

  For Beverly, Alice, and Ed Wolfe

  Bricks are usually rectangular, because in that way they are most suitable for building the vertical walls of our houses. But anyone who has had to do with the stacking of stones of a non-cubic type will be well aware of other possibilities. For instance, one can make use of tetrahedrons alternating with octahedrons. They are not practicable for human beings to build with, because they make neither vertical walls nor horizontal floor. However, when this building is filled with water, flatworms can swim in it.

  -M.C. Escher

  1]

  Moldenke would remain.

  As a child they kept him in a crumbling house, a building with structural moans, whose eaves cracked in summer heat and gathered winter ice.

  At that point Moldenke's chest held two lungs and a single heart.

  He experienced a shortened boyhood, a small degree of youth and carelessness.

  Most phenomena puzzled him and sent him on aimless walks among the leafless ether trees. He would fix on his goggles, his gauze pad, and study the flying birds, see them casting frightened earthward glances.

  He would press his face against the pane of his bedroom lookout as spring fell and wait for the greenbird. The greenbird would circle a dying ether, peck spirals on its dry trunk. Moldenke would fold himself into a chair and watch the greenbird work, writing down its habits, behaviors, and essences:

  Rapid pecking followed by pauses. Long, agile tongue coated with a jellylike substance, good for rooting in tree trunks for larvae and etcetera. When the tongue is retracted it apparently wraps about the brain.

  Things were loose in those days for Moldenke. He was free and new green, bright suns behind him, spirals ahead.

  2]

  When his mind wandered it took him to a sunchoked acre of grasses and weed where a snow of pollen lay yellow on the ground, a place like a rotunda, obviously complete, although nothing suggested architecture. There was no apparent ceiling and no visible dome.

  Warm winds would lap at his stringy hair arrangement. He would feel no pulse, faint metabolism, conscious only of the hum and flow. He would recall what Doctor Burnheart had said to him on one occasion: “Take wing, Moldenke. Life is flight if you choose to ride the updrafts.”

  He would circle the acre in pollen silence with his better ear open. The silence would give way to a labored breathing, the sound of a single lung in difficulty. Then, on a cue from no visible source, something with mudded claws would spit clots from surrounding bushes. Moldenke would imagine himself turning away, his chin on his chest, one hand in a pocket.

  The Moldenke mind was airy, like a dirigible loosed from its tethers.

  3]

  He felt something without form, something edgeless, rushing at him from the direction of eastern light. He pressed his nose against a lookout, saw a pattern coming together at the horizon of city and sky. He crabbed backwardly up the false stairwell and crouched in a blind spot. “Is that you, Bunce? Mr. Bunce?”

  It moved through his room, the visitor, touching things to its nose and snorting, and sat in Moldenke's chair.

  Moldenke turned on a light, “Yes?”

  The visitor stood and approached him, opening its ear valve to relieve pressure. “You should stay in the chair now, Moldenke. I will remain in the hallway and watch your door. It is a pleasure to know you.”

  4]

  The phone rang. Moldenke picked up the speaker:

  “Hello?”

  “Yes, hello.” It seemed a genuine voice. “Is this Moldenke?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Well, well...Moldenke?”

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “Never mind that. By the way, are you leaning against a wall?”

  “No.”

  “Would you mind?”

  “No, I wouldn't.”

  “Then please lean.”

  “The phone is in the middle of the room. I can't.”

  “Good, try squatting.”

  Moldenke squatted. “There. Now, who's calling?”

  “Never mind that, jocko. You know who this is.”

  “Mr. Bunce?”

  “Exactly correct, Mr. Moldenke. Old friend Bunce. What say we halt these amenities and face the grit? I have a reason for calling you, jocko. A number of reasons in fact; one particular is a pressing little matter of tapes. You might say I called to talk tape. That would be sufficient.”

  “I'm not playing, Bunce.”

  “He's not playing, he says.”

  'That's right.”

  “I warn you not to fiddle, Moldenke. This is a business call and I'm speaking on a business phone.”

  Moldenke felt floor through his soft, catkin slippers, was conscious of trapped gas within his pajamas, imagined a raincoat under his skin, and an indoor rain.

  “Were talking dumps, Moldenke. Don't give me gas. I have some tapes here that may be of major importance to you, all nicely packaged and locked in my kitty-box.”

  Moldenke hung up.

  5]

  Dear Moldenke,

  I think of you often these days. How are things in the cities? I wish you could be with me in this country air. Yes, Moldenke. Air. You should be breathing it occasionally, if not constantly. After all, you're the one with the problem heart.

  My special regards, as ever,

  Doctor Burnheart

  6]

  She would say, “Play the Buxtehude, Moldenke. I enjoy the chills it gives me.” She would close the door behind herself and leave him alone in the piano
room with its pots of ivy and ant-traps.

  He would begin the Buxtehude on the cold keyboard. In the bedroom she would listen through a wall.

  He would play the Buxtehude until ants crawled along his fingers and assembled on his sleeves.

  He would then walk to the kitchen, carrying his hands like packages, and scrape the ants into a teaboil. Roberta would emerge from the bedroom, stand in the doorway in her flannel. Moldenke would turn from the tea boil and smile, his old silver tooth throwing out a rod of light.

  Roberta would say, “Tea?”

  Moldenke would add mock sugar. “Yes, would you like a cup?”

  She would always have a cup. She would say, “As always.”

  Moldenke would have his with potato milk, she without.

  7]

  When he was a boy, a student, whenever he loaned out a book it would come back with nosewipes in the margins and down the spine.

  8]

  He put the speaker to his better ear and listened for a dial tone. There was static, someone pouring rice from bowl to bowl.

  He fixed the speaker in its cradle and went to his lookout. Buildings, vehicles, something above suggesting sky.

  Two suns up, a bright day.

  American hearts beating in the street.

  9]

  Over the seasons Moldenke's faith diminished. If he opened a spigot and got water, no matter how clouded or sour, he was gratified, as though he no longer expected it, although he loved water as nearly as he loved anything. That was the way with Moldenke, a brightly burning candle with a shortened wick, destined to burn low and give off gas.