The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Richardson Maurice

Author:Richardson, Maurice [Richardson, Maurice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gloomy Seahorse Press
Published: 2014-03-29T20:00:00+00:00

ENGELBRECHT AND THE MECHANICAL BRAIN

The Committee’s announcement that the Mechanical Brain has been made an honorary member of the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club gets rather a mixed reception.

In the vast, cigar-shaped Smoking Room, which is even blacker than usual with the post-prandial fumes of hashish, marijuana, opium, mescal, and other, less homely, narcotics, the gossip is all of the prospective addition to our company.

The opposition is led by two of the oldest members, nicknamed, so as to distinguish them one from another, the Formless Shape and the Shapeless Form. These testy wraiths are quite invisible with indignation at the Committee for not giving them a chance to blackball the monster.

Others, while less intransigent, express apprehension.

“If you ask me,” says Joey DeAth, pulling hard at a refractory, ether-pickled Elfweed, “we got quite enough thought-readers in this club already.”

Little Charlie Wapentake, surfacing after a marathon puff at his multiple bubble-bubble, opines sagely: “Gnash it all, I mean to say, what, he’s going to take up the deuce of a lot of room, eh? They say he occupies three floors of the Town Hall.”

And Chippy de Zoete voices the opinion of the majority when he roars: “I vote we give the bounder the cold shoulder!” Which, as anyone who has had a peep at Chippy’s electro-encephalogram will scarcely need to be told, is more likely to mean the hot foot.

However, as Salvador Dali never tires of reminding us, the best-laid schemes of mice and Surrealist Sportsmen gang aft agley. When our new honorary member is carried into the Smoking Room, and unpacked and put together by his attendants, he proves so nippy at anticipating Chippy’s practical jokes—always knowing exactly where in the carpet the forest fire is going to break out, which chandeliers have been timed to go off as catherine wheels and which to rain down assegais—and takes them all in such good part that before long he has become the most popular member in the club. His dials are thronged from Dreamtime to Coma with Surrealist Sportsmen, eager to chew the fat with him, and perhaps pick up a tip for some forthcoming cosmic event. Every now and again, such is the spell of the Mechanical Brain’s captivating personality, they burst into: “For he’s a jolly good entity! And so say all of us!”

Into this atmosphere of peace and goodwill to all thought-forms enters my friend Engelbrecht, the dwarf surrealist boxer, fresh from a tour of the Welsh holiday resorts, where he has been giving a series of exhibition bouts with a punch-drunk dentist’s chair who fights under the name of Casse Noisette.

Some of us have figured that Engelbrecht’s experiences in the ring, knocking the dials off clocks and eviscerating slot machines with right hooks to the works, will not be such as to endear him to a Mechanical Brain, and mischief-makers have hopes of promoting an unseemly fracas in the Smoking Room.

But no sooner does the Mechanical Brain catch on to Engelbrecht’s wavelength than all the dials start purring at once and he registers the maximum degree of pleasure possible.

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