The Motif of Harmful Sensation

By Robert Pritchard

Gerard Hetz, secret agent in the employ of Nazi Germany, is sent to Paraguay to establish safe houses for the ODESSA Project. In 1931 Berlin, Detective Dietel vainly strives to find the perpetrator of a series of child murders. Filmmaker Herman Dansk prepares his masterpiece, a movie that will reveal the truth to anyone who watches it. In 1999, Peter Rafennes finds a videotape on his doorstep one morning, containing Dansk's movie. And the murders investigated by Dietel seem to be repeating in Los Angeles 68 years later, unless psychologist Alan Thrush can find their source. And it all has something to do with some paintings by the artist Emil Czakó, paintings whose demonic power appears to have been key to both the Nazis' initial success and their ultimate demise. The Motif of Harmful Sensation looks at the secret history of the twentieth century from several angles, in the tradition of Robert Anton Wilson and Thomas Pynchon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Pritchard
• Release date: May 10, 2012

Robert Pritchard

A train is racing out of control. There’s a switch that can divert the train between two different tracks. Tied up on the first track are five people: ordinary, boring people. You don’t know most of them, except one is your former high school principal. On the other track is a luscious blonde with bazooms out to here. Her tight red sweater is ripped a little, exposing a long line of milky white cleavage; her black leather skirt is riding up over her hips. Shit. I forgot where I was going with this. Anyway it turns out you were the one who tied them all up and are driving the train. That’s what reading Robert Pritchard’s work is like. Early signs were inauspicious. At the hour of his birth a serpent and a raven fought under a blood-red moon, and later both were made into burritos. His childhood was difficult. He lacked the capacity for abstract thought; also he kept writing the number 5 backwards. Yet somewhere, deep within his soul, was a voice that said, “Pepsi: Generation Next!” Now, even as you read this, he lights a cigarillo and sinks into a green leather armchair in the library of his mansion. He sips a gin and tonic. Spring comes. People marry and die. Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie. And, in the fullness of time, another Robert Pritchard is born.

Book preview

The Motif of Harmful Sensation

a novel

by

Robert Pritchard

SMASHWORDS EDITION

PUBLISHED BY:

Robert Pritchard on Smashwords

The Motif of Harmful Sensation

Copyright © 2012 by Robert Pritchard

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

Part One: Empire

Chapter One

Who is he?

The glint of spectacles nodded through the smoke at a man in a three piece suit. The man's eerie calm was visible from across the room; he had a silver watch chain and a pressed suit, a square face and greased black hair. He leaned against the bar with one newly shined shoe resting on the brass pipe near the floor.

He's a Hungarian. Roland Keseman tapped a pack of cigarettes against the table, shaking on loose, and drew it out from the pack with his lips. He lit it. I feel nervous in here without a cigarette. The room was hot with body heat and clamorous with their voices. Keseman and his companion were blocked from the commotion by their high-walled booth; the soot-stained paneling absorbed the light and sheltered them in shadow.

Is he a soldier?

Who isn't these days? Keseman replied. Wedging his cig between the notches of the ashtray, he gulped down the glass of whisky in front of him. He served with Austria. He replaced the Krone in his mouth. In the east. He waved his hand and a barmaid brought him another drink. Next to him, Hauer's ill-formed face was florid from rapid liquor consumption. It was the alcoholism of the expectation of death.

Keseman slid out of the booth and navigated through the crowds to the man at the bar. He languidly sipped a white russian and did not stir in the least when Keseman good evening standing behind him. The bar was full so he tapped the guy sitting next to the Hungarian on the shoulder opposite, and when he turned Keseman slipped onto the stool; the other man went crashing to the floor, dead drunk. Barmaids saw to him. The Hungarian was looking at him already.

Now why would you give up your comfortable booth with Gregor Hauer to sit at a crowded bar? he said. Keseman had to concentrate to hear him over the din. Or did you want to speak with me?

The latter, certainly. You knew I was sitting over there? He noticed it for the first time in this very first gaze and it would remained with him always thereafter; he experienced a strange sensation speaking to this man; as though he were a specimen being looked at through a microscope, an amusingly inferior bauble, maybe not even a person, but an automaton displaying all the features of personhood with nothing but servomechanisms and hydraulic pumps inside.

Maybe it was just a lucky guess.

Maybe you know who I am also?

The man took his watch from his pocket and looked at it. It's getting late.

Keseman nodded: So it is. Would you like to come to my table? We can talk in private. I'm sure you have other activities that require your time. They went back to the booth. May I introduce Gregor Hauer, MrI don't think I caught your name? he said as they sat down. He knew the man's name, but scored a small point forcing him to say it.

Czakó. Emil Czakó, he said. It's an honor, he said. If he saw and noted our presence from across the room without us, who were observing him, even being aware he looked in our direction, Keseman thought, then what is he capable of seeing when he devotes his attention to it?

You were in the east? Hauer was saying. That's right, Czakó said. He fixed Hauer with an icy stare. Were you? He knows Hauer's biography better than Hauer does, Keseman thought, and though he may parade about bemedaled in showy uniforms Hauer was never at any front. Hauer dropped his eyes to the table and stammered something.

So where are you going next Mr Czakó? Keseman said.

Hadn't quite decided. Would like to make it back to Austria eventually.

Your nation wants for more loyal servants like you, or it wouldn't be crumbling. Where exactly?

Vienna, for the art.

Have you thought about staying here for a while? There's opportunity for a man of your colors.

Their drinks were refilled; Czakó looked off lazily into the distance. Keseman was baffled already by this person; only seconds before they were engaged in conversation, now it was as though he and Hauer weren't even there.

Would you like to go for a walk? Czakó said suddenly.

A walk? Is that safe? The snipers, they see something moving. . . But Czakó was already on his feet and departing and Keseman found himself inexorably pulled along in his wake.

The night was very cold and pleasantly dim; the pops of people taking random shots at other people could be heard far off like champagne bottles opening but this little corner of the city seemed reasonably tranquil. Czakó strolled with his hands in the pockets of his greatcoat, Keseman walked with arms stiffly against his sides from the cold.

I heard you turned down promotions in order to remain at the front? Keseman said. Why would you do that?

Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. You were never in combat?

I enlisted, they turned me down. My heart Czakó stopped him with a wave of his hand. They paused in conversation for a moment to climb over a barricade. Artillery fire had apparently hit the stone façade of an office buildingthis was the financial districtcausing rubble and bent metal desks to spill out, swamping the barricade's left flank.

What's your friend's excuse?

Hauer? He's not really my friend; we're in the same Corps. He was in a reserve echelon. Powerful protectors, friends of his father.

I knew right away about him. I wasn't quite certain with you.

They walked down the street a little more. The hulking black towers formed a canyon down which they silently drifted.

Why would you do that, elect to remain at the front?

Why, why. People always ask the wrong questions. There is no why; just what, how, who. Don't look for motivations. Things happen, but there's no need to look for why.

They walked to a stationhouse of the Freikorps: a jagged stone towerformerly an office buildingfortified with boarded windows, sandbag bunkers, barricades across the street. In the dark it just seemed lonely but he knew that like a hive it buzzed with activity under the surface, and watchman lurked on the roof with long rifles. Keseman doffed his cap so they could see his face and not shoot. They walked up the steep pyramid of steps and passed the sentries at the door. Inside it was bright and warm, with the smell of coffee and pastries thick in the air. There were men with guns all around but Czakó took notice to anything, preferring to walk casually down the corridor. But that's just the impression he wants to give, that he notices nothing, Keseman knew. Really there's no detail that escapes him. Suddenly the senseless babble of the hundreds of voices turn meaningful; there seemed to be something very important taking place. Keseman cast about for a familiar face. It appeared some shooting had taken place somewhere else in the building. He didn't get the sense that it was revolutionists making an attack. By eavesdropping on select conversations, he was able to pierce together what appeared to be at best a highly plausible series of events: being held in the makeshift jail, either in the furnace, trash, and mail rooms that occupied the basements or near the roof, were a number of revolutionist leaders, including the two most important: Luxembourg and Liebknecht. This was fairly certain. Keseman knew these two had been captured by the Freikorps not long ago but he was unaware of their location. What was subject to debate was the thesis, suddenly pervasive in the hallway, that they had just been executed, or, in the prevailing bureaucratic terminology, shot while attempting escape. Since there was the possibility that an escape would be considered too unlikely given the conditions of their incarceration, it was still uncertain whether their cause of death would eventually be changed to suicide. He outlined this theory to Czakó.

I know, he said. You really think I should stick around here? You think there's enough work to keep me busy?

The revolution will be over soon and when it is the republic is sure to fall. That spells opportunity. We've got an army here that's ready to take control of the streets and put on end to the anarchy, veterans of the wars, like you, who've been toughened at the fronts. But what we need is men whose talents are of more subtle cast, if you get me. We're familiar with your record on the eastern frontso yeah, we think you'd fit in. Czakó seemed to nod sagely, or perhaps only thought about something else right then. A new ripple of information ran through the room. Now there grew a consensus among the crowd, that Luxembourg and Liebknecht were indeed dead, by gunshot, within the last half hour. The surviving Spartacists would sorely miss them. The sense among the men was that the choice to get rid of the ringleaders was appropriate; as long as the republic government chose to rely on the Freikorps to suppress the revolution they were justified in doing anything within their power to bring about the successful conclusion to that struggle.

Maybe I'll stick around for a while, Keseman, Czakó said at last. You may yet find ways to amuse me.

Chapter Two

"You're not fully capable of understanding film yet. The opportunity that someone like me, someone in my shoes, has to appreciate what this form, this medium, can do for—for anything, really. Now, first of all, you're my producer, you're like my own brother for Christ's sake, and I know no one out there's more excited than you about the possibilities which we are beginning to realize—but let me tell you that not even you can fully capable of understanding just how high we can go with this. What would you say the return viewed figures were on our last picture? That's close, that's close. There were actually five points higher but that's quibbling. But that was a high guess. My guess is that no one on the street is going to give you a guess anywhere near that high. You could because you have the inside track. Exactly. So. You agree then that the numbers on viewer return rate are good, they're better than good really—and my point is that all this has been achieved with nothing but the same techniques that have been in use since nineteen hundred. They date back to the very first moving pictures shows, the kinetoscopes of the American Edison. The advertising methods are even older. We are using twigs and sooty stones to try to launch a rocket that could take us to the moon. We are using smoldering matches to light the fuses on our blockbuster bombs. And it's not going to get the job done. It's not going to get the job done. Two more of these, please, martinis both. Where was I? What I'm talking about is not another picture like the last one; we could go one doing that until doomsday and, no doubt, other will. But not us. Not us. I'd like you to think of this meeting, this lunch, as a historic moment. When they sum up the century's great moments, this lunch may not be on their lists, but what do they ever know. We'll know. We'll know that this glossy black table and these martini glasses were the most important glossy black table and martini glasses in this whole hundred years. This, right here, is Ground Zero. What do I have in mind? Okay. 1927, Gerechtigkeit. Our silent film, the story of the worker uprising in the technocratic city, and the technocrats's attempt to turn back their tide through the use of a robot. I remember the scene in which the robot was endowed with life; it was my favorite of the picture. To think that even in the four years since then we have unleashed a thousand imitators. 'I've created a monster!' Right, right. They all want the robot now. All the little kids with the dime comics, bubblegum. And to think of the trouble we, or at least I, for I spared you most of the trouble, and thank God too right, to get every shot right. Hundreds of people standing in the water for hours. How hoarse my voice was after a day on the set. Then came sound: an American again. Fortunately we were not on a project or that would have meant more delays. And our current film is on schedule. I knew waiting until I had the good story, the good material, would be worth it, and it has been. Waiting for the technology of sound to sink in. So many of the first films felt like they had to talk all the time simply because they could. Decker, Steiglitz. Browne. Waiting was the right decision, and Die Hand Die Verletzt, it's only three quarters done, on schedule, but it'll definitely be the best of my career to date.

"But all we've been doing to date has been the creation of pictures that are, well, for all their motion, static. We create the film, people view it. I want to do more than that and, for our next project, we will. The pictures we have now will be out of fashion soon even if we were not the press ahead with our next project. In a hundred years a handful of cognoscenti may watch Gerechtigkeit but it will be all but forgotten by the masses and film will fail if it cannot reach the masses; this is a mass medium, maybe the first true mass medium in history. Second, radio was the first. But film will go much father than radio can. Film is not picture displacing sound; it is picture plus sound. There's still so much more we could do. In the future we will create a complete environment; each viewer will be contained within a fabric, a network, a spider's web, of information: the sights, the sounds, and more physical effects as well. Our next picture will take advantage of our new wealth of knowledge about the senses, about psychology, para-psychology, things we are just learning, hypnotism, subliminal messaging, background cues, about the psyche, the universal unconscious, spiders. Our next picture will not be so easily forgotten because, with it, will we tap these things and in doing so create something so penetrating that the world will reel in astonishment, in shock, maybe even in horror. We do not consider that possibility as reason to shy away from the extreme. We will step back from the idea of the film as fiction, as something you watch, a story you see; it will become real. It will become the truth; it will be the truth. Yes, there will be a script, there will be actors, all the accoutrements of the traditional motion picture. But there will also be truth. This will, as you know, require capital. More than Die Hand Die Verletzt by maybe fifty percent. I've spoken to a few other people, industrialists, patron-of-the-arts aristocrats, for backing and the early returns look good. Karl von Huber is interested, and several others have expressed positive regard. You'll produce of course, and you shouldn't have to put up any more than your usual share capital-wise. I'll give the other contributors executive producer slots: money, but no actual involvement.

"What sort of time frame are we looking at? If we begin shooting, say, six months after we end postproduction on our current project, we should can the whole thing in eighteen months, give or take. Allow another two months for distribution and setup nationwide and you have a release date of December '33. This economic dreariness will clear by then.

I haven't settled on a title yet.

Chapter Three

In the town of Werknau, on the salty Baltic coast of Pomerania, which has since lost its name when it become part of Poland, a strange discovery came to light near the end of March of the present year. The local police were baffled by it and, as has been related in very brief elsewhere in this volumn, in good time summoned the national bureau of investigations, whose crack detectives, with the most ultra-modern crime-fighting methods and techniques at their disposal, were not so likely to be stumped. One must remember that the atmosphere in these small, out-of-the-way town remained extraordinarly provincial, that travel had not become as common as it was in 1999, for instance, that the average fisherman or housewife (and the inhabitants of this particular sea-faring village, thought they were not fishermen to the extent that their fathers or grandfathers had been, still derived much of their identity from the sea and the livelihoods dependent on it) could still be appellated with the sobriquet yokel. This is true of most of Europe, especially the farther one moves east and south, but this traditionalism was living a dangerously precarious existence at the eve of the century's second third.

The bodies, which were clustered together, in a ring, faced outward. Some arms were linking in another's arms; some were not. The only thing resembling a weapon was a knife, roughly five inches in length, such as could be found in any hunter's shed: a utilitarian knife, used for cutting up game. The knife was reconstructed by police after being found in two pieces, apparently shattered by forces unknown. This later came to seem strange because in the testimony of the five widows, each questioned separately, all explicitly state that their husbands had armed them quite heavily before leaving the house on what four of the five described as a weekend hunting trip, even though it was Wednesday. The fifth man told his wife a very different story before leaving; however, seeing as his widow was in a patently disturbed state, police were uncertain how much credence to give her.

The men themselves: five middle-aged males, were veterans all who made made their lives in the town of their birth. As was usually the case in the small provincial town of the era, they had known each other since early childhood, some as close friends. Their names were, in alphabetical order by surname: Stanislaw Betacski, Hans Eckburg, Adolf Sachs, Otto Snyder, and Rudolf Töll. They lay on five gurneys in the morgue as the medical examiner for the state looked at each one in turn, lifting up the white cloth under which each body reposed. The medical examiner was a thin man with a red face; he poked peevishly at the corpses as though he were the one dead, and they the cause of it. At the order of the state, autopsies were to be performed upon all the bodies, as their cause of death was not apparent by a sight examination. The most striking feature of the quintet was, well, their features, which were locked in a severe rictus. As to what the expression—all five bore the same combination of constricted cheeks, lips tightly drawn back from the teeth, curled tongue, and general exertion of all the other facial muscles—signified, opinions varied, though the most common view among the members of the medical community who had been privileged to view to exhibits was that it was simply a nonconscious response to the circumstances of their death, which must have involved either starvation, asphyxiation, exposure to extreme heat or cold, or some combination of the above, and etched onto their faces by rigor mortis. The monkey wrench in that theory was that they showed no signs of emaciation, either long- or short-term, nor was the location where they were found by the hermit one of extreme tempuratures in either direction on the mercury. Thus the doctors either focused all their hopes for a biological cause of the facial expressions on asphyxiation despite the evidence that this method of death did not cause their expression or they dismissed the reports of the "yokels' who had explored the beginning of the cave system in the entrance to which the men had been found.

Werknau, narrow cobblestone streets and two-story stone buildings clustered around a rocky bay, was a place where theories, unbeholden to any reality, could spring up with extreme rapidity. In the frozen bodies of the five men recovered from the cave they grew at a record-breaking pace. Disregarding the opinions of the medical personnel from the outside who had come to assist, some said the occult was at work, others the criminal element. Among the most popular theorists was Werknau's native doctor, the venerable Helmut Götten, of fraying hair and pointy nose, whose prognostications changed with the weather and whose Hippocratic beliefs were mostly an elaboration on Napoleonic (early nineteenth century) themes. The question, then, for the national bureau, was how to remove the evidence (at this point only the corpses, their tagged and bagged clothing, and the two pieces of the knife, counted as such; nothing else had been found) and hence jurisdiction of the case to Berlin and prevented the incident from snowballing into a national conundrum.

In the night, chugging stolidly, spewing a trail of still darker smoke and ash across the already black sky, a train moved south. There was an engine, black iron, two rust-red sleeper cars of the Pullman type though of German manufacture, and for a caboose a special car, also black, equipped with a refrigeration system running off a gas generator. Under the white linoleum floor of the car were banks of electrical batteries, squat dirty cylinders connected by tangled wires, that could provide up to thirty minutes of power to the refrigeration system should the generators fail. The car was locked at front and rear doors and one of three keys and the only one aboard the train this night was in the inside vest pocket a twenty nine year old man who slumped back on the cheap red fabric of his seat in a cabin in one of the two sleeper cars holding a hand of cards across his stomach and grimacing at his bad luck. He played cards with the woman on the other side of the table. Thought it was night and the lights in the cabin caused the large window to reflect only their room and themselves back too them, they kept the curtains open; the countryside could be felt moving by even if it couldn't be seen and when morning came they would be in Berlin. The stubble was making itself felt on his cheeks and chin. In the caboose, which, if you haven't guessed, is a morgue-car, repose the five stiff bodies from Werknau. They were taken from their resting place in that town and placed on this train to make a midnight run to Berlin and safety (from the perpective of the heads in charge). Gerard Hetz was their agent in this maneuver and now he is tired from the long day and from the whiskey he drank on the train and he curls on the couch-bed (the woman takes her, and his, shoes off), physically and emotionally drained, and somewhat maudlin. With his brown hair cut longer than is the man in the street's he has a strong boyish aspect. He has taken off his vest (his jacket has hung on the door's hook since they boarded); it is draped over the arm of some chair. There is a bit more darkness in the room now that they have stopped playing cards. The woman holds him since he is crying and he rests his head on her chest, his nose against her neck. He is crying from a confluence of the alcohol, the night-train journey, his fears that he is coming to nothing in this life, among other things. The woman's white buttondown shirt becomes wet across the front with tears; she stares at the ceiling, gently rocking as the train moves, her aerodynamic face indolent and unresponsive as he cries against her breasts, slipping on downwards to between her legs.

While they celebrated nothing in particular on that side of town, the four-car train eased into a station lit only by tiki torches and flashlights around four in the morning. Mr Hetz brushed the back of his hand across his cheeks to check the progress of his stubble. He pulled the peaked cap across his head anyway, checked his pockets for key and sidearm. Leni came out of the cramped Pullman bathroom, upset and surly but pulling herself together