The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville

Author:China Miéville
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

1941

Jack Parsons was drunk.

The Surrealists were playing a game. He watched them sourly. Varo drew a snake coiled on a wheeled cart. She scribbled it in seconds. From where he was sat, Jack alone could see what she was drawing.

“Allons-y,” she said. She held it up and turned it around, for one second, to show it to Lamba, who drew her own quick version. Which she showed to Lam, who showed his own rendition to Yves Tanguy, and so on. The glimpses were diminishing echoes, evolving from corkscrew serpent on its chariot to a spiral on a square.

The frivolity disgusted him. But though Parsons could not say why, watching excited him.

His hosts played games of whispering, hearing and mishearing each other’s words. They played games of attention and chance. They played games of absurdity and misunderstanding. Fry watched with affectionate interest; Miriam with fascination. Mary Jayne smoked in the doorway, her arm around Raymond. He radiated disdain.

The games produced strange figures, and sentences that made no sense but that too made Parsons’s breath come quick. Do what thou wilt.

The Surrealists drew and hid what they drew, folded paper to obscure it. They passed their papers around and added to each other’s unseen images. Watching, Parsons breathed out in time to a gust of wind that rattled a forgotten painting in a tree’s canopy outside.

Oh, he thought with a rush, as they passed their papers again. Each drew a head and hid it and passed it; each drew a body and passed it again; each drew legs or a base. Oh, I get it. I get it.

He rocked in his chair. He understood the link between his Colquhoun, the occultist, the hermeticist, tapper into the world’s backways, and the Colquhoun close to this austere, courteous Breton. The connection of the golden dawn and animals and pleromic beyond to the woman committed to the liberation of dreams.

From an overlap in the middle of a Venn diagram, Colquhoun watched him.

Maybe, he thought, in the suburbs of this oppressed town, this edge of an edge, maybe at this moment in a room full of the stateless, in a nation from which they wanted out, maybe here while they played foolish games to thumb their noses at perpetrators of mass murder, maybe an engine that he had built to do the math to make a clay man walk, to make words and numbers intervene as presences, might tap something else, too. Something that might trouble the Nazis.

“I know a game,” he said. No one looked at him.

He ran upstairs, returned with all his mechanisms. The Surrealists were on another round. Parsons watched them draw while he connected cords to batteries and muttered powerful words.

“What are you making?” Fry said, looking at the mess of mechanics. “Is that art?” He looked triumphantly at Miriam. The Surrealists kept passing their papers.

“Right,” said Jack. “It’s an art thing.” He turned switches, he checked gauges. He placed crystals, vacuum tubes, bits of paper at strategic places in the room.

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