Thomas Ligotti - Teatro Grottesco

Not long after realizing the aforementioned facts of my existence, I was sitting at the counter of a crummy little coffee shop. It was late at night, and I was eating soup. I was also thinking about how I might make an end of it. The coffee shop may have been in a small town or a large city. Now that I think of it, the place stood beneath a highway overpass, so it must have been the latter. The only other customer in the place was a well-dressed man sitting at the other end of the counter. He was drinking a cup of coffee and, I noted, directing a sidelong glance at me every so often. I turned my head toward him and gave him a protracted stare. He smiled and asked if he could join me at my end of the counter.

‘You can do whatever you like. I’m leaving.’

‘Not just yet,’ he said as he sat down at the counter stool next to mine. ‘What business are you in?’

‘None in particular. Why?’

‘I don’t know. You just seem like someone who knows his way around. You’ve been some places, am I right?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said.

‘I thought as much. Look, I’m not just interested in chit-chat here. I work on commission finding people like you. And I think you’ve got what it takes.’

‘For what?’ I asked.

‘Town management,’ he replied.

I finished off the last few spoonfuls of my soup. I wiped my mouth with a paper napkin. ‘Tell me more,’ I said.

It was either that or make an end of it.

At the time I met the man who authored the stories that follow, I had reached a crisis point in my own work as a writer of fiction. This gentleman, who was considerably older than I, was several steps ahead of me along the same path. ‘I have always desired to escape,’ he said, ‘from the grip of show business .’ He said these words to me across the table in a corner booth of the coffee shop where all our meetings took place in the late hours of the night.

We had been first introduced by a waitress working the night shift who noticed we were both insomniacs who came into the coffee shop and sat for many hours smoking cigarettes (the same brand), drinking the terrible decaffeinated coffee they served in that place, and every so often jotting something in the respective notebooks which we both kept at hand. ‘All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,’ the other man said to me during our initial meeting. ‘Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by — whether it’s religious scriptures or makeshift slogans — all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires — show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there —’ he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, ‘show business, show business, show business.’ ‘And what about dreams?’ I asked, thinking I might have hit upon an exception to his dogmatic view, or at least one that he would accept as such. ‘You mean the dreams of the sort we are having at this moment or the ones we have when we’re fortunate enough to sleep?’ I told him his point was well taken and withdrew my challenge, having only half-heartedly advanced it in the first place. The conversation nevertheless proceeded along the same course — he submitting one example after another of show business phenomena ; I attempting to propose plausible exceptions to the idiosyncratic doctrine with which he seemed hopelessly obsessed — until we went our separate ways just before dawn.

That first meeting set the tone and fixed the subject matter of my subsequent encounters in the coffee shop with the gentleman I would come to regard as my lost literary father. I should say that I deliberately encouraged the gentleman’s mania and did all I could to keep our conversations focused on it, since I felt that his show-business obsession related in the most intimate way with my own quandary, or crisis, as a writer of fiction. What exactly did he mean by ‘show business’? Why did he find the ‘essentially show-business nature’ of all phenomena to be problematic? How did his work as an author coincide with, or perhaps oppose, what he called the ‘show-business world’?

‘I make no claims for my writing, nor have any hopes for it as a means for escaping the grip of show business,’ he said. ‘Writing is simply another action I perform on cue . I order this terrible coffee because I’m in a second-rate coffee shop. I smoke another cigarette because my body tells me it’s time to do so. Likewise, I write because I’m prompted to write, nothing more.’

Seeing an entrance to a matter more closely related to my own immediate interest, or quandary or crisis, I asked him about his writing and specifically about what focus it might be said to have, what ‘center of interest,’ as I put it.

‘My focus, or center of interest,’ he said, ‘has always been the wretched show business of my own life — an autobiographical wretchedness that is not even first-rate show business but more like a series of sideshows, senseless episodes without continuity or coherence except that which, by virtue of my being the ringmaster of this miserable circus of sideshows, I assign to it in the most bogus and show-businesslike fashion, which of course fails to maintain any genuine effect of continuity or coherence, inevitably so. But this, I’ve found, is the very essence of show business, all of which in fact is no more than sideshow business. The unexpected mutations, the sheer baselessness of beings, the volatility of things… By necessity we live in a world, a sideshow world, where everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.’

‘By what standard?’ I interjected before his words — which had arrived at the very heart of the crisis, quandary, and suffocating cul-de-sac of my existence as a writer of fiction — veered away. ‘I said by what standard,’ I repeated, ‘do you consider everything peculiar and ridiculous?’

After staring at me in a way that suggested he was not only considering my question, but was also evaluating me and my entire world, he replied: ‘By the standard of that unnameable, unknowable, and no doubt nonexistent order that is not show business.’

Without speaking another word he slid out of the corner booth, paid his check at the counter cash register, and walked out of the coffee shop.

That was the last occasion on which I spoke with this gentleman and fellow writer. The next time I visited the coffee shop and sat in the corner booth, the waitress who worked the night shift presented me with a small sheaf of pages. ‘He said to give these to you and that he wouldn’tbe back for them.’

‘That’s all he said?’ I asked.

‘That’s all,’ she answered.

I thanked her, ordered a decaffeinated coffee, lit a cigarette, and began to read the tales that follow.

For years I had been privileged to receive frequent and detailed communications regarding the most advanced scientific and metaphysical studies. This information was of a highly specialized nature that seemed to be unknown to the common run of scientists and metaphysicians, yet was nevertheless attainable by such avid non-specialists as myself, providing of course that one possessed a receptive temperament and willingly opened oneself to certain channels of thought and experience.

One day I received a very special communication whereby I learned that an astounding and quite unexpected breakthrough had been achieved — the culmination, it appeared, of many years of intense scientific and metaphysical study. This breakthrough, the communication informed me, concerned nothing less than the discovery of the true origins of all existential phenomena, both physical and metaphysical — the very source, as I understood the claims being made, of existence in the broadest possible sense. This special communication also told me that I had been selected to be among those who would be allowed a privileged view of everything involved in this startling breakthrough discovery, and therefore would be guaranteed a rare insight into the true origins of all existential phenomena. Since I was an individual who was highly receptive in temperament to the matter at hand, I need only present myself at the particular location where this incredible advance in scientific and metaphysical knowledge had occurred.